Finance Monthly September 2019 Edition

23 www.finance-monthly.com FINANCE & BUSINESS - IT OUTAGES issues and getting back up and running quickly should disaster strike. Safeguarding your data In the event of an IT failure or a ransomware attack, IT operators need a way to get systems back online and to do so fast. As noted by Gartner, the average cost of IT downtime is £4,400 per minute. The implications of IT failures go far beyond financial losses however, as they also damage the reputation of the business as well as lead to massive amounts of operative time lost. When a cyberattack or an IT outage takes place, it is not the failure or attack itself that causes the most harm but the resulting downtime of operations affecting productivity and credibility of the organisation. To avoid such losses organisations must put appropriate recovery systems in place. But to do so, they must first understand the IT systems they run and know what data they hold. To stop the nightmare scenario from becoming reality, a solution able to recover business-essential data and get the most crucial systems back online in minutes is needed. A zero-day approach to IT architecture can do just that, as it allows organisations to prioritise workloads, with a planned recovery strategy of making sure the most important systems are brought back to first in case of an outage. A zero-day recovery architecture is a service that enables operators to quickly bring workloads or data back into operation in the event of an IT failure or cyberattack, without having to worry about whether the workload is compromised. With the so-called 3-2-1 backup rule – meaning three copies of data stored on two different media and one backup kept offsite – zero-day recovery enables an IT department to partner with the cyber team and create a set of policies which define the architecture for what they want to do with data backups being stored offsite, normally in the cloud. This system assigns an appropriate storage cost and therefore recovery time to each workload according to their strategic value to the business, as all data is not created equal in terms of business continuity. This recovery system will only prove useful however when set up properly and tested thoroughly and frequently. Approximately 25% of organisations’ nightly backups fail – yet few will be aware of this due to a lack of recovery testing, meaning most businesses will have no idea what data has been lost in the process. With this in mind, operators need to perform disaster recovery testing on their data. Without testing in a controlled and simulated environment, it is impossible for IT and security teams to fully understand their systems’ integrity. Figuring out the data backup and recovery systems have failed after an IT outage has already taken place has no value – this needs to have been done before the worst has a chance to take place. IT outages in the financial sector are becoming more frequent. In fact, the number of such incidents reported to the Financial Conduct Authority increased by 138% in the first 9 months of 2018, and are showing no signs of slowing down, making them a question of when, not if. With a large portion of the infrastructure in the financial sector relying on IT, minimising outages and limiting threats to this infrastructure should be number one priority to systems operators. A zero-day recovery architecture is a service that enables operators to quickly bring workloads or data back into operation in the event of an IT failure or cyberattack, without having to worry about whether the workload is compromised. www.tectrade.com “ “