Cyber threats have grown more sophisticated, and the damage/likelihood of these threats continues to increase (outpacing natural disasters, for example).
As organizations adapt to an IT environment consisting of multiple public clouds, private clouds, edge, on-premises data centers, and SaaS providers, the complexity of managing and protecting this IT environment has significantly increased, compared with the traditional fortified management and protection of an on-premises data center. The potential attack surface has increased, and vulnerabilities arising from interconnections between different environments have also multiplied.
“Every year, the World Economic Forum classifies global risks perception among risk experts and world leaders in business, government, and civil society, and based both on impact and likelihood, cyberattack has ranked very high on that list over the last few years,” Weston says. The damage from these attacks goes beyond immediate financial loss — in 2021 the average cost of a data breach rose to $4.24 million, the highest in the past 17 years — because they can impact customer acquisition and brand reputation, she says. An attack may even unravel an organization’s digital transformation strategy.
In a 2020 survey, 451 Research found that customers want to harness the power of multicloud hybrid environments but “struggle to adapt traditional resilience practices to this new world.” It found that resilience strategies are “immature for most” and that “65% of companies lack a management plan for hybrid today.”
“Cloud is a double-edged sword, because where it provides that flexibility and consumability of services, it also becomes a unique challenge to ensure resilience across the enterprise, because it’s now outside of your enterprise,” Weston says, noting that WFH “increased all of the threat vectors.”
This “immaturity” is especially problematic, given the operational, financial, and reputational danger of an enterprise outage caused either by a misconfiguration or a deliberate cyberattack.
“Security: That’s something that you have to be wide awake about all the time,” says Lyons. “It’s possible to take a shortcut and expose a security vulnerability.”
The National Stock Exchange of India Ltd. (NSE) is India’s leading stock exchange. Established in 1992 as the first demutualized electronic exchange in the country, NSE was the first exchange in India to provide a fully automated screen-based electronic trading system, in 1994, and in 2000 it offered the first internet trading in India. NSE has a total market capitalization of more than $2.27 trillion, making it the world’s 11th-largest stock exchange.
Faced with a heavily manual process that relied on experts and took several hours for a data center switchover, the NSE needed the right platform to automate its disaster recovery operations.
As India’s leading stock exchange, NSE needs to remain available, even during a disaster. It opted to work with Kyndryl to implement the Kyndryl Resiliency Orchestration solution for disaster recovery.