You Will Experience A Major Incident in 2016

According toย Dimensional Research, nearly 90 percent of companies with 5,000-10,000 employees experience a major incident at least monthly. While a quarter of companies with more than 10,000 employees experience a major incident at least weekly.

[easy-tweet tweet=”90% of companies with 5-10,000 employees experience a major incident every month” user=”comparethecloud” hashtags=”cloud, IT”]

This is – to say the least – a highly concerning challenge for CEOs, CIOs and IT managers to consider, which – no doubt – causes sleepless nights for some. Add the complexity of technological advancements, and change, across the business landscape into the mix, and watch your teamโ€™s stress levels rise.

There are so many factors these individuals need to consider in order to keep businessesโ€™ technology infrastructures running at both a strategic and tactical level.

Aside from investing in cloud-based communication solutions, that enable any business process or application to trigger two-way communication throughout the extended enterprise during these time-sensitve events, what other areas are a priority to stay on top of?

Cloud security

Only a few years back, many of our customers were sceptical about cloud migration due to security concerns. But, as cloud platforms continue to improve, many of these concerns are actually easing and dissipating.ย 

the bad guys are getting smarter too

The drawback, though, is that the bad guys are getting smarter too. Data breaches and malware attacks increase every year. Last year, some significant cyber-attack victims included TalkTalk, British Gas and most recently, website development and hosting platform Moonfruit.

Therefore, as is expected, IT departments will need to spend more on data encryption, malware detection, firewalls and other ways to improve security.ย And it wonโ€™t be just about installing sytems. Educating employees will be more important than before too.ย 

[easy-tweet tweet=”IT departments will need to spend more on #data #encryption and #malware detection” user=”comparethecloud”]

Data encryption

Many companies have been swapping email communications in favour of faster and better encrypted applications. Even terrorists are following suit and using encrypted social communication apps to manage their communications. Some security experts โ€“ in fact — thinkย terrorist organisations are even using PlayStation 4, which is particularly difficult to decrypt. Therefore, at some point there will likely be a greater public debate about the nexus between cloud security, public safety, personal privacy and information volume.ย 

Even terrorists are following suit and using encrypted social communication apps

DevOps, DevOps, DevOps

We all know and appreciate that efficiency is everything in business. Today, having developers just throw new software over the wall to operations doesn’t make much sense — it’s the same as marketing throwing collateral over the wall to sales.ย  This isnโ€™t feasible and doesn’t work.

Typically, organisations that have adopted agile development and a DevOps mentality have reaped the benefits, and they’ll only do better as they get better at it.ย 

According to New Relic, companies that deploy DevOps practices, code up to 30 times more frequently than their competition. This reduces the risk of change and provides faster access to new functionality. Furthermore, Puppet Labsโ€™ 2013 State of DevOps survey says the vast majority of deployments are successful.ย 

[easy-tweet tweet=”Companies that deploy #DevOps practices, #code up to 30 times more frequently than their competition”]

Cloud migration

Investing relatively small amounts to piecemeal cloud implementation will become a thing of the past. Due to the change occurring across the industry, there will be a greater movement of companies towards adopting/implementing cloud solutions, with budgets from inside and outside IT, and expenditure moving to above-board operational expenditures.ย  What this ultimately means is that businesses will create real value, through solutions, storage, service providers and outsourcing.ย 

Hybrid cloud adoption

Hybrid clouds combine the power and scale of public clouds with the security and technical control of private clouds. According to Gartner, nearly half of large enterprises will deploy a hybrid cloud environment before the end of 2017; and with better API compatibility being a strong feature of hybrid cloud approaches, companies can use private clouds as staging environments before deploying to a public cloud.ย And, if Gartner is correct, which I suspect it is, now is the time to explore hybrid clouds.

With the plethora of technological challenges that CIOs are stacked against, having a solution in place to enable intelligent communication processes across the business to manage operations and deal with incidents is utterly critical.ย 

it is an imperative to keep systems secure

While it is an imperative to keep systems secure or move towards cloud computing, as the Dimension Research indicates, there is an extremely high possibility of a major incident occurring within your business. This makes it vital to ensure that, aside from staying technologically ahead of the game, that your communication processes are up to scratch too.

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Troy McAlpin, CEO, xMatters, inc.

Troy McAlpin brings more than 20 years of experience to his leadership role at xMatters, with expertise in process automation, strategic initiatives and corporate strategy. His domain experience includes IT strategy and vertical market expertise including technology, banking, consumer and retail industries.ย  Prior to founding xMatters, he managed marketing, sales, development, M&A and financial aspects at two successful start-up companies and also worked at AT&T Solutions and Andersen.

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