Coordination over investment

Spending more money on additional infrastructure or redundant cloud providers isn’t the answer. After all, following every major outage, Jayaprakasam says sales pitches arrive promising zero downtime if organizations spend more on new platforms. He pushes back on those claims. In a well-architected hybrid cloud setup, he says resilience is more often a coordination problem than a spending problem, and distributing workloads across two cloud providers doesn’t guarantee better outcomes if the clouds rely on the same power grid, or experience the same regional failure event.

He argues that the more effective approach is strengthening coordination between IT, cybersecurity, business continuity, and third-party vendors. “The real question is whether you have the right contacts, process, and response patterns in place,” he says. That coordination includes creating a single view of dependencies, practicing joint response exercises, and ensuring that vendors can be reached and escalated during an incident. You can gradually develop advanced dependency mapping of your assets across boundaries to simulate potential impact radius scenarios.

In addition, Jayaprakasam believes that many organizations already have strong response processes but they simply apply them too narrowly. Legal and compliance teams, for example, have well established playbooks for cyber incidents, and those playbooks can also apply to operational disruptions.