FEATURE : DATA SECURITY
music to the ears of cloud , connectivity and Softwareas-a-Service ( SaaS ) providers , with great power comes great responsibility .
No more downtime
If IT is to live up to this critical infrastructure status , availability must be a given . Think about the frequency with which power cuts or empty water taps actually occur . These are infrequent events which still cause surprise and generate headline news .
Can we honestly say the same about the availability of IT services ? Think about how often routers need rebooting and applications fail to respond to basic commands . Furthermore , cyber-breaches occur on a daily basis – with some statistics suggesting around 30,000 websites are hacked every day .
For technology to be elevated to utility status , there needs to be an agreed level of service to which providers are held accountable by independent regulators . Simply put , ‘ this page cannot be displayed ’ and ‘ computer says no ’ moments have to become a thing of the past . While in principle , such a scenario may seem unattractive to technology giants , this expectation is befitting of the vital role technology plays in almost every aspect of our lives today .
Beyond the possibility of opposition from Silicon Valley , there are other challenges to consider with regulating technology . Using the examples of social media and search , enforcing a level of service for something that the consumer does not pay to use would be an almost unprecedented move .
However , subscription-based SaaS models lend themselves well to such regulation . Arguably , that regulation already exists and is called a Service License Agreement ( SLA ).
These are set by the service provider , which is legally obliged to fulfil the SLA once a contract with a customer or partner has been signed . Given the impact of downtime on businesses , we are already seeing customers demand more of their provider .
According to Veeam ’ s 2020 Data Protection Trends
Report , 95 % of global organizations suffer unexpected outages – lasting an average of almost two hours . For High Priority applications , which account for over half of a company ’ s applications , one hour of downtime is estimated to cost US $ 67,651 .
That means for an application such as email , payments , websites and mobile apps , one outage costs an average of over US $ 135,000 . While companies can fight the case for compensation , change providers if they are dissatisfied , or demand urgent maintenance of a system that causes downtime , there is no one size fits all insurance model to protect businesses .
54 INTELLIGENTCIO NORTH AMERICA www . intelligentcio . com