With the advent of more and more connected systems and devices, organizations are facing ever greater data security challenges.

Moreover, with the accelerating cloudification of apps and even whole infrastructures, security professionals are also faced with the challenge of how to protect critical assets including personal and other sensitive data as well as IP.

To complicate things even more, with the cloud providing additional opportunities for employees to share data across departments and locations, the risk of leakage is quickly rising, rendering organizations more vulnerable than ever.

It’s no surprise, then, that 66% of IT professionals rank security as their greatest concern in the adoption of cloud computing.

Furthermore, when considering the fact that the digital universe is expected to reach 44 zettabytes by the end of 2020, making sure that nothing disrupts or puts all that data at risk will continue to challenge CISOs and their teams in the near, mid, and long term.

But, it’s not just about data protection. Ensuring security is also about being able to run the business smoothly, without interruption, without disruption, and without risking customer satisfaction and loyalty, as well as employee productivity.

For, when you’re not focused on your core business and are pre-occupied with the chaos of handling a critical incident, there’s no doubt – both customers and employees take note.

Reliability vs. availability

“Whether you provide managed services or hosted solutions for customers, or you’re an enterprise performing your own IT operations support, maintaining a high level of service availability is critical and directly affects business outcomes for your organization.” (NetworkComputing)

So, when dealing with critical systems, whether customer-centric or those that drive internal productivity, no organization can afford anything less than 4-9’s uptime (i.e. 99.99%). In fact, we would say that they can’t afford less than 5-9’s (99.999%) availability.

Yes, 5-9’s. And, yes – availability, not reliability. Because, ultimately, all these 9’s are about making sure that employees, customers, partners – and any other stakeholder, do what they want and need to do. What they get paid or pay to do.

If the apps and systems that they need to execute their objective are not available, so much is at risk – from productivity, to costs, to revenues, and even brand reputation.

And beyond minimizing the ‘bad,’ i.e. business downtime and the disruption to business, 5-9’s can also accentuate the ‘good,’ by making sure that the organization lives up to its promise of superlative quality of service, a constant of industry-leading competitiveness, regardless of the industry.

Making 5-9’s a reality

The key to 5-9’s – contrary to common perception – does not solely rest on the ability to prevent ‘stuff from breaking down.’ Rather, it is no less reliant upon an organization’s ability to ‘put it back together.’

This is where powerful incident resolution capabilities come into play.

For example, at its most basic level, so much time is often wasted just on trying to understand whether a security alert requires action or investigation. Then, think about how much more time is wasted on chasing down all the right folks who are slated to handle an incident, if deemed that it requires action. Then, what about the unnecessary efforts put into duplicate actions and repeated updates?

What powerful incident resolution looks like

But it doesn’t have to be that way. With automated critical incident management and orchestration, security professionals can profoundly accelerate containment. They can gather the incident team in a matter of minutes vs. hours.

Once, all the relevant incident stakeholders are rounded up, they can check into a virtual situation room, where they can organize an effective plan and even share information throughout the process.

This way everyone is always on the same page, no more endlessly repeating updates, no more chasing down the right people to take urgent action.

This powerful approach also removes a great deal of the documentation and reporting overhead that is typically placed on the incident investigator.

But not only is documentation and reporting streamlined, root cause analysis and the overall post-mortem can also be expedited with greater efficiency and accuracy.

And this is what Exigence is all about!

To learn about how Exigence makes it happen with a whole new, powerful, automated, and streamlined way to resolve incidents, we invite you to reach out to us at info@exigence.io.