BSI ID: G 0.33

Staff shortages can have a significant impact on an institution and its business processes. Staff may be absent unexpectedly due to illness, accident, death or strike. Furthermore, predictable staff shortages due to holidays, training or regular termination of employment must also be taken into account, especially if the remaining working time is reduced, e.g. due to holiday entitlement. Staff absences can also be caused by internal job changes.

Examples:

• Due to prolonged illness, a company's network administrator was absent from work. Initially, the network continued to run without any problems in the affected company. However, after two weeks, following a system crash, no one was able to fix the error because only this administrator was familiar with the network operations. This led to a network outage lasting several days.

• During an administrator's holiday, an institution had to access the backup media in the data security vault. The access code for the vault had been changed shortly before and was only known to this administrator. It took several days to restore the data because the administrator could not be reached during his holiday.

• In the event of a pandemic, more and more staff will gradually be absent for longer periods of time, whether due to illness, the need to care for relatives or to look after children. Some employees will also stay away from work for fear of infection on public transport or at the institution. As a result, only the most essential work can be carried out. The necessary maintenance of the systems, whether the central server or the air conditioning in the data centre, can no longer be carried out. Gradually, more and more systems fail as a result.