In the event that a business IT system were to fail, the clock begins ticking immediately. Revenue growth comes to a standstill, customer trust begins to wane, and the stress level for the current IT leadership increases exponentially by the minute. For current CISOs and IT management, the problem is not just about restoring systems, it is about proving that the company was ready for such an event in the first place.
In today’s complex and evolving threat landscape, it is not enough for the current IT leadership to provide simple solutions for complex problems. Ransomware, infrastructure failures, and supply chain attacks have made it a near certainty that any company that has not invested in a resilient framework for their IT systems will face some form of unexpected downtime. The creation of an IT strategy that is able to effectively handle such unexpected events is no longer a choice, it is a competitive imperative.
Assessing the Threat Landscape and the True Cost of Downtime
While the cost of unexpected system failures can vary greatly across industries, the damage to an organization is ultimately the same. Before an effective framework for resiliency can be developed, current IT leadership must first understand where their most significant threats lie. This includes understanding the cost of an hour, or a day, of unexpected downtime.
Designing a Redundant Framework Without Single Points of Failure
In order for an IT framework to be considered redundant, it needs to be able to recover from unexpected events without suffering from a single point of failure, which includes a detailed examination of network infrastructure, storage systems, power supplies, and cloud services. It is imperative that critical systems are prioritized in accordance with overall impact to the business, as redundancy without prioritization leads to a lack of focus and resources for critical systems.
Integrating Rapid Recovery into Daily Operations
It is recognized that the speed of recovery is what differentiates an incident from a disaster. Organizations that utilize enterprise disaster recovery solutions as part of their overall IT strategy, as opposed to an afterthought, have faster recoveries with significantly less data loss. This includes replication, failover, and well-defined recovery time objectives that bring disaster recovery from theory to practice.
Testing and Evolution: Keeping Resilience Plans Current
It’s recognized that having a resilience strategy that has not been tested is similar to one that has not been implemented. It is imperative that stress tests, tabletop exercises, and simulated failure scenarios are used to ensure that the overall resilience strategy is accurate and up to date. More importantly, remember that testing is used to create a feedback loop, where each exercise should have documented results that are used to inform the next iteration of the overall strategy. Threats evolve, and so should resilience strategies.
From Cost Center to Organizational Foundation
The most significant thing that IT leadership can do today is to shift the perception from being a cost center to being a foundation for the organization. If the IT department is able to keep the lights on, they will earn their place as a respected member of the organization. This means more influence, more money, and more power in terms of decisions.
Resilience, developed carefully and continuously, is how IT leadership stops managing crises - and starts preventing them!
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