The Pandemic Impact on Organizations Security and Resiliency: The Workflow Satisfiability Problem

The new work model imposed during the pandemic impacted organizations badly, especially those with rigid business strategies. Therefore, they were forced to provide digital platforms for their clients and allow remote work for employees. The rapid shift to remote work increased cyberthreats and attack vectors. Thus, organizations had to enforce their security policy, apply security constraints for a safe and secure inter-organizational collaborations. Consequently, the absence of employees because of the pandemic and the rigid application of the security policy caused the unavailability of collaborating organizations. Thus, the execution of inter-organizational workflow may not be complete, which increases the possibility that the workflow satisfiability problem (WSP) occurs. In this paper, we present an approach to selecting an inter-organizational workflow assignment plan. It uses the multicriteria decision method and Bayesian inference to select organizations for collaboration. The approach aims to ensure resilient and secure inter-organizational workflow execution with a low probability for the WSP. © 2022, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.