IT downtime costs businesses more than £300 billion every year. 2024 alone has shown organizations to be highly vulnerable to IT failures, leading to widespread disruption in industries such as healthcare, aviation and banking. However, these critical services cannot afford a single minute of downtime as it significantly impacts emergency services and the bottom line.
These disruptions have exposed the risk of complex digital environments and the vulnerabilities in the IT infrastructure of many companies. Therefore, organizations must explore prevention strategies and limit the impact to protect their business. By addressing cybersecurity breaches within hybrid cloud environments and implementing contingency measures, CIOs can strengthen resilience against potential IT disruptions. Here are four strategies CIOs should consider.
Chief Technology Officer, (Private Cloud), Rackspace Technology.
Evaluate the existing infrastructure
To effectively prepare for future service outages, CIOs must first look inward – to better understand their weaknesses and bottlenecks. This assessment of their existing infrastructure should include a comprehensive audit of all existing systems, interdependencies and business continuity planning.
Once they have a holistic view of their existing infrastructure, CIOs can make necessary changes to their mission-critical systems. Attention should be paid to those areas that are most vulnerable to potential disruptions or that would cause the most damage to data security and operations if offline.
A key part of this evaluation process should be testing backup systems and failover mechanisms that are critical to business continuity when IT disruptions occur. Reducing downtime and keeping services online will be a priority for every CIO amid unexpected disruptions.
Choose tailor-made cloud solutions
Cloud-based solutions improve resilience against disruptions, which is essential for organizations handling sensitive data. CIOs must look 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 size of the hybrid cloud market was estimated at $73.5 billion in 2023 – and is expected to reach $210.4 billion by 2032. So it is not surprising that organizations are adopting a hybrid cloud approach to further increase resilience. A hybrid cloud approach provides a robust and flexible IT environment that backs up legacy systems and distributes the workload across cloud providers to reduce their dependence 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 by selecting a provider that is GDPR compliant in the UK or CPPA in the US.
For this to be successful, employees need the necessary training to work across multiple cloud computing providers so that critical operations can continue uninterrupted across other cloud platforms.
Reduce security vulnerabilities
In addition to adopting cloud solutions that increase resilience to outages, CIOs must regularly update systems to protect themselves against service disruptions. Recent outages have shown that not all companies are testing and deploying these patches as carefully as they should. So it’s crucial that you’re on top of patch management to mitigate the threat of cyber vulnerabilities.
To increase their threat detection, CIOs must strengthen their cyber intelligence, security analytics, alerts and response services. An important phase in this process is monitoring and analyzing large amounts of traffic and events in real time.
CIOs should also have an incident response plan to combat multi-cloud vulnerabilities. With the right planning, procedures, controls, and cloud-specific response policies, they can limit the potential problems caused by security breaches and ensure rapid recovery after incidents occur.
Ensure you have a skilled IT staff
Communication gaps between IT security teams and senior business leaders can create significant gaps in the security of applications and broader services. This is proof that CIOs cannot prepare their organizations for IT disruptions alone. Successful disruption prevention and recovery depends on a workforce that is technologically competent and has the skills necessary to collaborate on resilience strategies.
To achieve this, CIOs must take responsibility for building a skilled workforce that can help manage complex, multi-cloud environments. Building this team of experts requires a detailed training program that covers critical areas such as cloud management, cyber and resilience planning along with disaster recovery.
CIOs must also ensure that departments within their organizations work together to improve each other’s understanding of their unique operational needs. CIOs should run simulations and test scenarios that take into account the broader context, such as the impact of outages on each team’s functional capacity. And they need to communicate with all stakeholders so that everyone – internal or external – is aware of what is happening within the company.
Leader in network outage prevention
At a time when organizations are regularly experiencing IT outages, it is more important than ever for CIOs to evaluate their organization’s IT infrastructure and cyber vulnerabilities, both for the ‘as-is’ landscape and for the impact of any software and infrastructure change programs. Once they have a holistic view of the gaps that need to be filled, they can leverage the benefits of cloud-based solutions and coordinate their team to limit the threat of disruption. Failure to follow these steps could open the door to significant business impact in the future.
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