โ† Risk Taxonomy
#32

Inadequate operational resilience

Risk taxonomy

Definition

Operational resilience or service continuity plans increase in complexity due to the broad set of services and capabilities of Gen AI.

Controls & guardrails that address this

81 proposed

Grouped by control function, with the AI lifecycle stage(s) to apply each and the other risks it addresses. Filter by control category below.

Control category
Corrective ยท 8
Operational resilience targets defined at design

Define operational resilience requirements (RTO, RPO, availability SLA) for the AI system at design stage.

Lifecycle stage1 โ€“ Use Case Context & Design
Modular architecture

Design a modular AI architecture with independent failover, rollback, and degraded-mode capability.

Lifecycle stage3 โ€“ Onboarding, Build & Review
AI system inclusion in BCP and DRP

Include the AI system in BCP and DRP. Define recovery procedures for AI components and test at least annually.

Lifecycle stage3 โ€“ Onboarding, Build & Review
Robustness testing

Conduct load, failover, and chaos testing before production deployment. Block go-live if RTO/RPO criteria are not met.

Lifecycle stages4 โ€“ Deployment5 โ€“ Usage, Monitoring & Change
AI incident response runbook with severity triage and classification

Define AI incident categories, severity tiers, and triage flow before go-live. Gate launch on governance approval of the plan and named roles.

source: NIST SP 800-61r2 Computer Security Incident Handling Guide (Preparation; Detection & Analysis โ€“ incident categorisation/prioritisation); NIST AI RMF MANAGE 4.1
Lifecycle stages1 โ€“ Use Case Context & Design5 โ€“ Usage, Monitoring & Change
BCP/DRP activation and degraded-mode continuity for AI services

Set the AI service's criticality tier, RTO/RPO, and degraded-mode service level at design with business sign-off. Register it in enterprise BCP scope.

source: ISO 22301 Business Continuity Management; ISO/IEC 27031; NIST SP 800-34r1 (Activation & Notification, Recovery)
Lifecycle stages1 โ€“ Use Case Context & Design3 โ€“ Onboarding, Build & Review5 โ€“ Usage, Monitoring & Change
Defined escalation path to a designated AI incident response team

Wire detections into the IR queue and verify paging with a test escalation before go-live. Gate release on a successful dry-run.

source: ISO/IEC 27035-1:2023 Information security incident management (incident response coordination); NIST SP 800-61r2 (Coordination & Information Sharing)
Lifecycle stages4 โ€“ Deployment5 โ€“ Usage, Monitoring & Change
Self-hosted / open-weight model capability for security operations (defensive-use continuity)โœš proposed

Maintain a self-hosted or open-weight model, on your own infrastructure, that incident responders can use to triage adversarial artefacts (exploit logs, payloads) without being refused by third-party provider guardrails and without exfiltrating sensitive incident data to an external API โ€” so investigation capability survives exactly when it's needed.

source: Case study: huggingface-agentic-intrusion
Lifecycle stage5 โ€“ Usage, Monitoring & Change
Open these in the Control Library โ†’

Other risks in Robustness & Stability

AI RiskAtlas is an educational model of how GenAI & agentic systems work and fail. Architectures and payloads are illustrative and simplified for learning โ€” not operational guidance. Real-world cases are summarised from public reporting.

Sources & further reading โ†’ยทBuilt by Shi Yuan โ†—