Strategy For Addressing Outages While Working Remotely

Organizations should ensure their systems are designed to fail over and continue running without human intervention, according to Kieran Norton, cyber risk services infrastructure solution leader for Deloitte Risk & Financial Advisory.

Businesses probably didn’t have a bunch of people sitting in a data center during the worst of COVID-19, meaning that they must ensure they’re able to bring up core systems in a rapid fashion using remote access in the event of an outage. Norton said this requires a different level of technical capability, planning and design. For starters, businesses must be able to access and communicate with core systems remotely.

Server architecture running out of internal data centers is incompatible with remote work if the server hard drives need to be replaced, if a section of the data center goes down and must be brought up manually, or if a failover requires people to run data backups when getting the other system up and running. Conversely, apps architected for the cloud can easily redirect resources and continue operating.