About the Session

Most organizations document their critical services and dependencies, but those maps rarely reflect what actually happens when something fails. In this session, we walk through a realistic financial services scenario where a single infrastructure failure cascades across multitude of interconnected services, revealing all single points of failure that didn't appear in any existing documentation.

Using dependency mapping and cascade simulation techniques, we examine why traditional BIA and continuity planning consistently miss hidden interdependencies, why maps go stale within weeks of being built, and what practitioners can do to close the gap between documented resilience and actual resilience. The session draws on real-world conversations with Canadian financial services resilience professionals and is designed to be interactive, with participants mapping their own assumptions against simulated outcomes.

What You Will Learn

At the end of this session, participants will be able to:

1. Identify why standard dependency documentation misses critical cascade paths, and how to structure dependency maps that capture second and third-order failure impacts across technology, people, and vendor relationships.
2. Apply a simulation-based approach to validate business impact analysis assumptions by testing what actually breaks when a specific service goes down, rather than relying on theoretical RTO/RPO values.
3. Evaluate practical methods for keeping dependency maps current in organizations where ownership is unclear and maintenance is nobody's priority, including trigger-based review processes tied to change management.