What CIOs can do differently to prepare their infrastructure for a service outage

IT downtime costs businesses over £300 billion annually. 2024 alone has proven that organizations are deeply vulnerable to IT outages, which resulted in widespread disruptions in sectors including healthcare, aviation and banking. However, these critical services cannot afford a single minute of downtime as this significantly impacts emergency services and the business’s bottom line.

These disruptions have exposed the risk of complex digital environments and the vulnerabilities existing within many companies’ IT infrastructure. As such, organizations should explore prevention strategies and impact mitigation to safeguard their business. By addressing cybersecurity breaches within hybrid cloud environments and implementing contingency measures, CIOs can strengthen resilience against potential IT outages. Here are four strategies that CIOs should consider.

Evaluate existing infrastructure

To effectively prepare against future service outages, CIOs must first look within – to gain a better understanding of their weaknesses and bottlenecks. This assessment of their existing infrastructure should include an extensive audit of all legacy systems, interdependencies and business continuity planning.

Once they have a holistic view of their existing infrastructure, CIOs can make the necessary changes to their mission-critical systems. Attention should be given to those areas most vulnerable to potential outages or those that would cause the most damage to data security and operations should they be offline.

A key part of this evaluation process should be testing backup systems and failover mechanisms crucial for business continuity when IT disruptions occur. Reducing downtime and keeping services online will be a priority for any CIO amidst unexpected outages.

Adopt bespoke cloud solutions

Cloud-based solutions improve resilience against outages, vital for organizations handling sensitive data. CIOs should seek to unlock the potential of hybrid cloud and combine the…