Enhancing Continuity: Risk Assessment Analysis of Mission-Critical Network Services in a Disaster-hit Area

Ever-increasing connectivity and telecommunication network performance optimization are powering innovative applications that connect people, organizations, and smart objects, changing the way we interact and redefining a wide range of industries. As systems become more complex, threats affect both safety and security attributes, and failures can lead to serious consequences. This fuels policies to improve business continuity and protection of mission-critical network services. Through the analysis of literature and use case, in this paper, we propose a continuous and dynamic workflow hypothesis for risk assessment (before and after the occurrence of an outage) that consists of some steps, namely risk identification, risk assessment, and mitigation strategy selection to facilitate the continuity of a cyber-physical system operating in a critical environment. The effectiveness of the methodology will be validated through the application to a seismic area in central Italy and the newly developed early warning system tailored to simulate a densely populated sensor network environment. The real-world scenario will demonstrate that the proposed workflow diagram supports resilience decision-making.