Unplanned downtime poses a serious problem for organizations, and is estimated to value International 2000 firms on common $200 million per yr. Past the monetary influence, it may additionally erode buyer belief and loyalty, lower productiveness, and even lead to authorized or privateness points.
A 2024 ransomware assault on Change Healthcare, the medical-billing subsidiary of trade big UnitedHealth Group—the most important well being and medical knowledge breach in US historical past—uncovered the information of round 190 million folks and led to weeks of outages for medical teams. One other ransomware assault in 2024, this time on CDK International, a software program agency that works with practically 15,000 auto dealerships in North America, led to round $1 billion price of losses for automobile sellers on account of the three-week disruption.
Managing danger and mitigating downtime is a rising problem for companies. As organizations grow to be ever extra interconnected, the increasing floor of networks and the fast adoption of applied sciences like AI are exposing new vulnerabilities—and extra alternatives for risk actors. Cyberattacks are additionally turning 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 method to safety and resilience. “We’ve had a standard method of doing issues that’s truly labored fairly properly for perhaps 15 to twenty years, nevertheless it’s been primarily based on detecting an incident after the occasion,” says Chris Millington, international cyber resilience technical skilled at Hitachi Vantara. “Now, we’ve obtained to be extra preventative and use intelligence to deal with making the techniques and enterprise extra resilient.”
This content material was produced by Insights, the customized content material arm of MIT Expertise Evaluate. It was not written by MIT Expertise Evaluate’s editorial employees. It was researched, designed, and written solely by human writers, editors, analysts, and illustrators. This consists of the writing of surveys and assortment of information for surveys. AI instruments that will have been used have been restricted to secondary manufacturing processes that handed thorough human evaluate.
