What single IT disaster scenario keeps you up at night? Share your battle plan for prevention and recovery.
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As a Chief Information Technology Officer with a deep interest in cybersecurity, one of the most concerning IT disaster scenarios is a widespread cyberattack targeting our city critical infrastructure and municipal services. Such an attack could compromise everything from public safety systems to utilities, causing not only digital disruption but also tangible effects on the city's residents i could use water network as a exemple.
Government regulation of the US AI industry putting us at a strategic disadvantage while hostile countries leapfrog us and weaponize AI against us. That is the biggest IT disaster scenario and it is literally happening. Preventing it would mean competent leadership and/or government getting out of the way of the industry entirely. Recovery would mean undoing the asinine executive order which was a gift to the first movers (who largely wrote it) but a total disaster for the AI industry and America. This will be seen as one of the greatest missteps in the history of our country. Train wreck in slow motion and entirely self-inflicted.
I can't forget when I was called from the construction site because one of the guests had infected the file server with ransomware. It took me several hours, not just one night, as the access management I had carefully planned confined and strictly segregated folders and shared paths.
I guess they are an Achilles' heel, a nightmare where called to work on on-premises servers as you have to ensure they work on shared resources in writing, but you don't have control over how such systems are governed.
Having been CIO for a number of 24x7 manufacturing operations, the disaster scenario usually involves production being stopped - keep in mind that this is likely to be costing the company hundreds of thousands of $$ per hour.
Prevention: multiple lines of defence, redundancy, remove single points of failure. High availability systems, across multiple data centres, diverse network routing, diverse power supplies etc etc. Plus, robust disaster recovery capabilities.
Recovery: identify the cause, isolate it, prevent further issues, route around it / replace it, ensure things are up and running quickly, then plan the permanent fix and implement it.