IT downtime costs businesses over £300 billion annually. 2024 alone has proven that organizations are deeply vulnerable to IT outages, which resulted in widespread disruptions in sectors including healthcare, aviation and banking. However, these critical services cannot afford a single minute of downtime as this significantly impacts emergency services and the business’s bottom line.
These disruptions have exposed the risk of complex digital environments and the vulnerabilities existing within many companies’ IT infrastructure. As such, organizations should explore prevention strategies and impact mitigation to safeguard their business. By addressing cybersecurity breaches within hybrid cloud environments and implementing contingency measures, CIOs can strengthen resilience against potential IT outages. Here are four strategies that CIOs should consider.
Evaluate existing infrastructure
To effectively prepare against future service outages, CIOs must first look within - to gain a better understanding of their weaknesses and bottlenecks. This assessment of their existing infrastructure should include an extensive audit of all legacy systems, interdependencies and business continuity planning.
Once they have a holistic view of their existing infrastructure, CIOs can make the necessary changes to their mission-critical systems. Attention should be given to those areas most vulnerable to potential outages or those that would cause the most damage to data security and operations should they be offline.
A key part of this evaluation process should be testing backup systems and failover mechanisms crucial for business continuity when IT disruptions occur. Reducing downtime and keeping services online will be a priority for any CIO amidst unexpected outages.
Adopt bespoke cloud solutions
Cloud-based solutions improve resilience against outages, vital for organizations handling sensitive data. CIOs should seek to unlock the potential of hybrid cloud and combine the scalability and cost-efficiency of public clouds with the enhanced security and risk mitigation capabilities of private infrastructure.
The global hybrid cloud market size was valued at $73.5 billion in 2023 – and is projected to reach $210.4 billion by 2032 so it’s unsurprising that organizations are adopting a hybrid cloud approach to further enhance resilience. A hybrid cloud approach provides a robust and flexible IT environment which backs up legacy systems and spreads workloads between several cloud providers to limit their reliance on a single point of failure. However, when moving to the public cloud, CIOs must consider data sovereignty to comply with local regulations, for example, selecting a provider that complies with GDPR in the UK or the CPPA in the US.
For this to be successful, employees need the necessary training to work across multiple cloud computing providers so critical operations can continue uninterrupted through other cloud platforms.
Reduce security vulnerabilities
Alongside adopting cloud solutions that enhance resilience against outages, CIOs should frequently update systems to protect themselves against service disruptions. Recent outages have demonstrated that not all businesses are testing and implementing these patches as carefully as they should, so it’s crucial to ensure being top of patch management to mitigate the threat of cyber vulnerabilities.
To increase their threat detection, CIOs need to strengthen their cyber intelligence, security analytics, alerts and response services. A key stage in this process is monitoring and analyzing vast quantities of traffic and events in real time.
CIOs should also have an incident response plan to combat multi-cloud vulnerabilities. With the appropriate planning, procedures, controls and cloud-specific response policies, they can limit the potential issues caused by security breaches and ensure a quick recovery after incidents occur.
Build a skilled IT workforce
Communication gaps between IT security teams and senior corporate leaders can create significant gaps in application and broader service security. This is proof that CIOs can’t prepare their organizations for IT outages alone. Successful outage prevention and recovery relies on a workforce that is technologically competent and has the skills needed to work together towards resilience strategies.
To achieve this, CIOs must take responsibility for building a skilled workforce that can help to manage complex, multi-cloud environments. Building this team of experts requires a detailed training program covering crucial areas like cloud management, cyber and resilience planning combined with disaster recovery.
CIOs also need to ensure departments within their organization are collaborating to improve each other’s understanding of their unique operational needs. CIOs should be running simulations and test scenarios which consider the wider context such as the consequences of outages on each team’s functional capacity. And they should be communicating with all stakeholders so that everyone – internally or externally – is aware of what’s happening within the business.
Leading the way in network outage prevention
At a time when organizations are regularly experiencing IT outages, it’s more essential than ever for CIOs to evaluate their organization's IT infrastructure and cyber vulnerabilities both for the ‘as-is’ landscape but also any software and infrastructure change program impacts. Once they have a holistic view of the gaps that need to be filled, they can unlock the benefits of cloud-based solutions and coordinate their team to mitigate the threat of disruption. If they don’t follow these steps, they could be opening the door to future significant business impact.
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