It’s not a question of “if”, but a certain “when”. Your network will be attacked. It will likely experience downtime, and restoring it to normal operation will most certainly be costly. Worst yet; it could be persistently hacked without your knowledge and provide rogue entities a direct line to all your corporate operations.
Bare metal, colocation, managed hosting, on-premises or cloud based? Fully vs. partially redundant, hot or cold stand-by, backed up or not? When corporations implement new, or re-evaluate their information infrastructure and services these questions are front and center in the minds of the project team. The mission: building a network that grows with the business and allows operations to run reliably, effectively and profitably as possible.
As the project develops, the team considers the network physical and virtual design, capital investments, recurrent costs, physical security, operational insurance and captures a myriad of other cost related factors. Then, the proverbial return on investment (ROI) evaluation is presented to the leadership and after the inevitable revisions; the project is launched.
Surely the ROI is a critical consideration but; what is the cost of one second of downtime?
We don’t need to get out the old “HP12C” to do this high level math. Depending on the industry and company we could be talking hundreds of thousands if not, millions of dollars.
Such being the case, it is not uncommon for corporations to make substantial investments, hundreds of thousands of dollars, protecting the network with redundant power supplies, redundant external circuits, backed-up databases, monitoring software, a network operations center (NOC) and as many tangible safeguards as they can think. Everyone feels great, right up until the moment John logs on the network, inserts the gift thumb-drive he received at the latest trade-show into his laptop’s USB port and “Black Friday” profits go “bye-bye”. (You know this is going to happen at the worst possible moment, right?)
The physical and virtual design, architecture and implementation of networks are all critical business success factors. Solid corporate policies, operational procedures, periodic threat evaluations and other elements that round out a good cybersecurity plan are as important of an investment as the hardware or cloud corporations chose to use.
If you don’t have a current and well managed and implemented cybersecurity plan you are betting blind against zero downtime. You may as well buy into a Poker game in Vegas and ask yourself: ”who is the mark?” Ante up.