CEO Blogs

Disaster Recovery is one of those best practices you can’t imagine needing – until your business gets hit by a power failure, bad weather, or a single-point-of-system failure you didn’t realize was there.

Suddenly, you need help. You need the right provider with the right solution, right now. In my last post, I reviewed the reasons why a cloud-based Disaster Recovery solution may be the best proactive measure for sustained resilience and outright prevention .

It remains sound advice – but how do you choose the right provider of cloud-based DR services?

If you check out the numbers , it’s clear that businesses with solid Disaster Recovery plans will be back on their feet within hours or days following an event, while the majority of those without DR plans — too often smaller businesses — won’t recover at all.

But it doesn’t have to be that way.

According to Gartner , by 2020 60% of businesses will suffer major service failures due to mismanagement of risk in new technology and use cases. This is why, in my last post, I suggested that the best way to deal with these risks is to commit to a strategy of resilience — “ the capacity of an organization to plan for and adapt to change or disruption through anticipation, protection, responsive capacity, and recoverability .”

To get a sense of a resilient business in 2015, let’s start with where you want to end up.

Have you noticed how people are talking more about risk these days? Not surprising, given the spectacular nature of recent hacks. Even reinsurers express worry: in a poll last fall , 40% ranked cyberattacks as the most threatening emerging risk of 2015.

Yet, cyberattacks threatening your systems’ security and your data’s privacy are only part of a much larger risk problem. This greater scope of risk is more about effect than cause – if you contain your risk strategy solely to cyberattacks, you’ll leave yourself exposed on other fronts.

At year’s end, I always find myself looking back over the previous 12 months and then, inevitably, I can’t help but look forward to the coming year. Since I’m in the information technology business, this exercise can be pretty interesting.

Technology trends translate into products and services that matter, but when you hear about technologies like web-scale IT, cloud bursting, advanced analytics, self-aware apps, context-rich systems, software-defined networks, etc. – well, it’s hard to keep your eyes from glazing over. So I’ll narrow it down to two waves coming at all of us:

The holiday season is upon us – which means it’s also cyberattack season. Though, arguably, 2014 has turned into an entire year of the cyberattack: one study estimates 2014 will rack up an incredible 42.8 million cyberattacks worldwide. That’s more than 117,000 attacks every day!

Which leads me to the topic of firewalls. It’s been 20 years since the first firewalls were deployed to make a perimeter gateway barrier blocking unwanted IP traffic.

Since then, firewalls have evolved to keep pace with new technologies, the ever-increasing complexities of network infrastructures and applications, and new business models that have spawned things like cloud computing and mobile apps. These days, companies deploying firewalls and advanced perimeter controls see a 15% return-on-investment .