G 0.33 Personnel Loss

The loss of personnel can have considerable impacts on an institution and its business processes. Personnel can, for example, become unexpectedly unavailable due to illness, accident, death, or strike. Furthermore, foreseeable personnel loss due to vacation, training, or regular termination of employment must also be considered, particularly if the remaining work time is shortened by, for example, accrued vacation time. Personnel loss can also be caused by an internal job change.

Examples:

• Due to prolonged illness, the person responsible for network administration at a company was absent from work. The network in the affected company initially continued to run without errors. However, after two weeks, following a system crash, no one was able to fix the error because there was only this one employee trained in network operations. This resulted in a network outage lasting several days.
• During the vacation of an IT operations employee, an institution had to access backup media in the data security vault. The access code to the vault had only been changed shortly before and was known only to this employee. It took several days before data restoration could be performed because the employee was not reachable during vacation.
• In the case of a pandemic, personnel gradually become unavailable for longer periods, either due to the illness itself, the necessary care of family members, or the care of children. Some employees also stay away from work out of fear of infection on public transportation or in the institution. As a result, only the most necessary work can be done. The required maintenance of systems, whether it is the central server or the air conditioning system in the data center, can no longer be accomplished. Gradually, more and more systems fail as a result.