Recent global IT outages have resulted in widespread chaos, from cancelled flights to healthcare and payroll disturbances. These disruptions to critical services have exposed vulnerabilities within many companies’ digital infrastructure, prompting urgent questions about prevention strategies and impact mitigation.
By implementing comprehensive contingency measures and addressing cybersecurity vulnerabilities within multi-cloud environments, technology leaders can significantly enhance their resilience against future IT disasters. To ensure long-term success, CIOs should consider the following strategies.
Assessing your current set-up
To effectively prepare against a potential service outage, CIOs must conduct a thorough examination of their organisation’s existing infrastructure. This is crucial for identifying vulnerabilities and pinpointing upgrade opportunities.
CIOs should start by conducting a thorough audit, which involves mapping out all legacy systems and their interdependencies and existing business continuity planning. Understanding how these systems influence service reliability will give CIOs a holistic view of potential weak points and bottlenecks that could lead to outages.
With a clear picture of the infrastructure, CIOs can then focus their efforts on amending mission-critical systems. Priority should be given to those areas most susceptible to outages or those which pose the greatest risk to data security and operational continuity.
To safeguard against service interruptions, CIOs should also fully test backup systems and failover mechanisms. These act as a safety net, ensuring business continuity in the event of system failures. By providing backup solutions and automated failover processes, organisations can minimise downtime and maintain services even in the face of unexpected disruptions.
Diversifying cloud service providers
Adopting cloud-based solutions to enhance resilience against outages is crucial for organisations, particularly those handling sensitive data like NHS trusts. While the public cloud offers benefits in terms of scalability and cost optimisation, it’s essential to balance these advantages with robust security measures and strategies to mitigate the risk of outages.
A hybrid cloud approach can further enhance resilience. By combining public and private cloud solutions, organisations can create a more robust and flexible IT environment and support the integration of legacy systems through a well-planned and executed evolution from traditional solutions. However, in moving to the public cloud, CIOs must consider data sovereignty to comply with local regulations. For UK organisations, this might mean selecting a UK-based cloud provider to address concerns around compliance with regulations like GDPR.
For some, improving resilience may include replication of critical data and application across more than one cloud, so they remain accessible for rapid recovery after disruption. Organisations can then tailor compliance and security policies based on the specific needs of each environment and workload. Adjusting security measures will enable businesses to respond effectively to evolving threats and maintain information security.
By distributing workloads across multiple cloud providers, organisations can further reduce their dependency on a single point of failure. This is not to be undertaken lightly as implicit in this approach is the need to have staff trained and capable in more than one cloud. If one provider experiences an outage, critical operations can continue uninterrupted through other cloud platforms. Additionally, utilising multi-region deployment across different providers ensures that if one region experiences an outage, services can continue to operate from another location.
Enhancing cybersecurity measures
In addition to adopting cloud-based solutions to enhance resilience against outages, CIOs must regularly update and patch systems to protect against vulnerabilities that could lead to service disruptions. However, recent incidents have shown that patches need to be implemented and tested carefully and not simply pushed to all devices.
This includes advanced threat detection, whereby organisations monitor and analyse large volumes of traffic and events in real-time, detecting threats such as malware, ransomware and zero-day exploits. It’s important that CIOs consolidate cyber threat intelligence, security analytics, alerts and response services to expand their capacity to detect these threats.
From there, they need to address vulnerabilities across multi-cloud environments. An incident-response plan is essential for this. CIOs must install comprehensive planning, procedures and controls, alongside cloud-specific response policies. This is crucial for reducing damage from potential security breaches, reducing downtime, and enabling a swift recovery from incidents.
Collaborating with other departments
CIOs need to work closely with other business units to gain a thorough understanding of their specific operational needs and the potential impact of outages on their functions. This ensures that disaster recovery plans are aligned with overall business objectives. It is important to run simulations or scenario testing to consider resilience in a wider context and not just the obvious.
They should prioritise the development of a highly skilled IT workforce capable of managing complex, multi-cloud environments. This involves implementing robust training programs in cloud management, disaster recovery, and resilience planning.
Successful outage prevention and recovery depend on a technologically competent workforce, and to achieve this CIOs should lead digital initiatives. These should aim to equip all staff members (not just IT personnel) with the necessary skills to contribute to resilience strategies.
Alongside department collaboration, CIOs must effectively communicate with stakeholders. It can be tempting to focus on fixing a problem during an outage, however, everyone (internal, external, or both) needs to know what’s going on.
Preparing your organisation’s infrastructure for anything
As IT outages continue to increase in scale and scope, organisations must tighten up their infrastructure to withstand disruptions and respond effectively to IT and security incidents. CIOs play a pivotal role in driving this change, taking proactive measures to evaluate their existing set-up, install robust threat protocols, distribute workloads across multiple cloud providers and ensure well-coordinated comprehensive test regimes. A failure to enhance their resilience will only leave organisations vulnerable to potentially damaging IT disruptions.
Simon Bennett is the global chief technology officer for private cloud at Rackspace Technology
Read more: What Lord Darzi’s report means for digital transformation in the NHS
