Understanding cyber complexity: Systems modeling and the financial services sector

Abstract

Recent developments within the financial services sector have demonstrated that as the diffusion of cyber enabled technologies increases, so too does dependency on a cyber infrastructure susceptible to failure, outages, and attacks. While current efforts are underway to introduce new methodologies and techniques to manage risks, particularly localized risks (such as those at a particular firm), developing resiliency at the system level requires transformative thinking to increase collaborative situational awareness, improve our understanding of risk, foster strategic coordination, and define actionable plans at the sector level to address pervasive sector-wide risk. The overall goal of this research is to develop innovative management and operational approaches using experts and emerging data sets available from the financial services industry along with simulation-driven technologies to enable real-world implementation of high- leverage opportunities to promote financial services resiliency.