Thanks to a growing number of high-profile cybersecurity attacks, data breaches and fines, business resilience has become a far more significant topic for many companies over the course of 2017.

On Friday 9th of November Zertocon Local offers businesses an opportunity to learn how to develop a sound IT resilience strategy.

As GDPR gets ever closer, more and more companies are realising that it is not just the cost of data loss and the loss of productivity from downtime to consider. The fines for data breaches and non-compliance can wipe out 4% of a company’s global revenue.

Despite this, the majority of organisations do not test disaster recovery (DR) comprehensively and would struggle to recover in their stated recovery time and point objectives. In a recent survey over 92% of organisations were down longer than they had planned.

Good corporate governance mandates that a disaster recovery strategy to ensure uptime, minimise data loss, and maximise productivity, is a necessary digital assurance policy for any company. The question has become not if a disaster will strike, but when it will happen.

Michael Murphy, Scotland Manager for Zerto, told DIGIT: “The cloud has delivered a paradigm shift in I.T. Organisations of all sizes must now understand that business resilience is a crucial part of their long-term survival and sustainability.

With the right help almost any business can become resilient in hours. Zertocon 2017 promises to be a great environment for sharing ideas, learning how to embrace change confidently and avoid being the next high-profile disaster victim.”

Zertocon Edinburgh will cover:

Learn how to mitigate risk

The threat on IT is becoming more sophisticated, heard about WannaCry? Learn how to mitigate the risk and ensure you can survive the major and minor impacts on business

Usher your business in to the cloud era

Learn how and why to leverage public, private or hybrid cloud and leave with a cloud strategy, or partnership to meet business demands

Align IT priorities with business value

Get advice from industry experts on how to clearly showcase the value of IT decisions to you, or your customer’s business by demonstrating how IT advances business priority

In 2017 the most common causes of outages have become ransomware, power failures/interruptions, hardware failures and simple human error.

To put it in context, some of the most notorious outages, which highlight the growing threat to business and illustrate the need to comprehensive disaster recovery include:

NAYANA

• Ransomware attack in June 2017
• All critical data encrypted with Erebus strain
• Largest ransom ever paid – $1 million

GITLAB

• Employee Error in January 2017
• “Accidentally deleted” primary production database
• Lost 6 hours of data, outage lasted 18 hours+

BRITISH AIRWAYS

Power failure in May 2017

Affected 75,000 passengers globally

Total cost – $76 million (4% of 2016 total operating profit)

Zertocon Edinburgh takes place at The Principal Hotel, George Street, Edinburgh. To find the full agenda and to register for tickets, visit the Zertocon Local website.