Defining Cyber Risk
Rapid digitization of the economy and social relations is the main reason why the issues of cyber risk, cyber threats and cybersecurity are continually gaining importance. Despite the increase in the number of research papers in these areas, scholarly articles defining cyber risk are relatively scarce. Moreover, the uniform broadly accepted definition of cyber risk has not been adopted yet, probably due to the interdisciplinary nature of this concept and the dynamics of its change. The paper contributes to the literature on the cyber risk, cybersecurity and cyber risk management.
Inherent Risk vs Residual Risk: Are They Still Relevant in Today’s Volatile Business Environment?
Inherent and residual risks remain vital in enterprise risk management, even amid today’s volatile business environment. Inherent risk reflects exposure before controls, while residual risk is what remains post-mitigation. Adapting these frameworks through dynamic assessments, analytics, and resilience-building ensures organisations effectively address evolving threats and thrive in uncertainty.
The Silent Consensus: How Groupthink Undermines Risk Assessment
Groupthink undermines risk management by fostering premature consensus, suppressing dissent, and distorting risk assessments and treatments. This article explores its psychological roots, real-world impacts, and offers practical strategies-structural, cultural, and technological-for risk professionals to mitigate groupthink, promote critical thinking, and enhance organisational decision-making resilience
The Resilience Imperative: Transforming Risk Management from Control to Capability
A risk register remains a valuable governance tool, providing a structured record of known risks, their potential impact, responsible owners and planned treatments. However, on its own, it is insufficient for organisations operating in an environment of interconnected disruption, rapid technological change, climate volatility, geopolitical uncertainty and shifting stakeholder expectations.
Strategic resilience extends risk management beyond recording and mitigating individual exposures. It is the organisational capability to anticipate emerging change, absorb disruption, maintain critical operations, recover effectively and adapt strategy when assumptions no longer hold. This requires a shift from measuring risks to strengthening capabilities, such as effective decision-making, supply-chain flexibility, cyber recovery, financial capacity, workforce adaptability and stakeholder communication.
Navigating the Storm: Risk Management in an Era of Economic Uncertainty
Amidst global economic turbulence, risk managers confront a myriad of complex challenges. This article delves into key insights from recent research on navigating economic uncertainty in risk management. Discover how mature practices, strategic integration, advanced analytics, and crossfunctional collaboration can help organisations not only mitigate risks but also capitalise on emerging opportunities in uncertain times.
The relationship between Enterprise Risk Management and Managerial Judgement in Decision-making: A Systematic Literature Review
Enterprise risk management (ERM) promises to improve decision-making and help organizations avoid wicked problems. Consequently, risk artefacts may play a significant role in managers’ decision-making processes, but little is known about the relationship between ERM and managerial judgement in decision-making (MJDM). The purpose of this paper is to present a systematic literature review of ERM, thereby filling this knowledge gap and providing an evidence based foundation for improving practice and advancing knowledge and theory development.
Cyber Risk and Cybersecurity: a Systematic Review of Data Availability
Cybercrime is estimated to have cost the global economy just under USD 1 trillion in 2020, indicating an increase of more than 50% since 2018. With the average cyber insurance claim rising from USD 145,000 in 2019 to USD 359,000 in 2020, there is a growing necessity for better cyber information sources, standardised databases, mandatory reporting and public awareness. This research analyses the extant academic and industry literature on cybersecurity and cyber risk management with a particular focus on data availability.
Spot Risks Early by Aligning Enterprise Risk Management Components
Proactively spotting risks requires aligning early warning systems (EWS), key risk indicators (KRIs), risk appetite, and risk tolerance. This integration enables organisations to monitor threats, act swiftly, and stay within strategic boundaries. Benefits include proactive risk management, cost savings, enhanced decision-making, stakeholder confidence, and adaptability to emerging risks, ensuring resilience and growth.
Zero Trust Frameworks: A Strategic Imperative for Managing Evolving Cyber Threats
Zero Trust is a modern cybersecurity framework that eliminates implicit trust, requiring continuous verification for every user and device. For risk professionals, it reduces attack surfaces, limits breach impacts, and enhances compliance, making it essential for managing evolving cyber risks in decentralised, cloud-driven, and hybrid work environments.
The South African Meta-Crisis: Managing Systemic Risk in an Interconnected Nation
South Africa’s meta-crisis is defined by interconnected risks rather than isolated threats. Climate transition pressures, institutional governance weaknesses, low economic growth, infrastructure constraints, municipal service-delivery failures and external financial shocks can interact and amplify one another across the national system.
For risk, strategy, resilience and audit professionals, this requires a shift from conventional risk registers towards systemic risk management. While risk registers remain important for identifying and monitoring discrete exposures, they do not adequately reveal dependencies, feedback loops or cascading consequences. Organisations must therefore map critical services, infrastructure, institutions and supply-chain dependencies to understand how disruptions may spread.
Climate change presents both physical and transition risks, particularly for carbon-intensive sectors and financial institutions. Governance quality within public institutions, municipalities and major asset managers is equally important because failures in oversight, accountability and service delivery can erode public trust and economic stability. Low growth, electricity and logistics constraints further intensify national vulnerability.
A stronger response requires scenario planning, horizon scanning, stress testing, integrated assurance and resilience-focused governance. South Africa’s ability to manage systemic risk will depend on better decisions, coordinated action and investments that strengthen the country’s capacity to anticipate, absorb, adapt to and recover from complex disruptions.