Unplanned downtime poses a serious problem for organizations, and is estimated to value World 2000 firms on common $200 million per yr. Past the monetary affect, it might probably additionally erode buyer belief and loyalty, lower productiveness, and even end in authorized or privateness points.
A 2024 ransomware assault on Change Healthcare, the medical-billing subsidiary of business big UnitedHealth Group—the most important well being and medical information breach in US historical past—uncovered the info of round 190 million individuals and led to weeks of outages for medical teams. One other ransomware assault in 2024, this time on CDK World, a software program agency that works with practically 15,000 auto dealerships in North America, led to round $1 billion value of losses for automobile sellers because of the three-week disruption.
Managing threat and mitigating downtime is a rising problem for companies. As organizations turn into ever extra interconnected, the increasing floor of networks and the speedy adoption of applied sciences like AI are exposing new vulnerabilities—and extra alternatives for menace actors. Cyberattacks are additionally changing into more and more subtle and damaging as AI-driven malware and malware-as-a-service platforms turbocharge assaults.
To arrange for these challenges head on, firms should take a extra proactive strategy to safety and resilience. “We’ve had a conventional approach of doing issues that’s truly labored fairly properly for perhaps 15 to twenty years, but it surely’s been based mostly on detecting an incident after the occasion,” says Chris Millington, world cyber resilience technical knowledgeable at Hitachi Vantara. “Now, we’ve obtained to be extra preventative and use intelligence to concentrate on making the techniques and enterprise extra resilient.”
This content material was produced by Insights, the customized content material arm of MIT Know-how Assessment. It was not written by MIT Know-how Assessment’s editorial workers. It was researched, designed, and written totally by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This consists of the writing of surveys and assortment of information for surveys. AI instruments which will have been used had been restricted to secondary manufacturing processes that handed thorough human overview.
