If I were the CISO for a publicly traded company, I would make availability one of my top priorities. Availability means that systems, data, and services are working when people need them. For a public company, downtime can be very serious. It can stop employees from working, upset customers, hurt sales, and damage the company’s reputation.
One protection I would implement is regular backups. Backups are important because they allow the company to restore data if something is deleted, damaged, or locked by ransomware. I would make sure backups are stored in more than one place. I would also test them often because a backup is not useful if it does not work when needed.
I would also use disaster recovery planning. This means the company has a clear plan for what to do if there is a major outage, cyberattack, natural disaster, or system failure. The plan should explain who is responsible, what steps to take, and how fast systems should be restored. This helps the company respond faster instead of panicking during a crisis.
Another protection would be redundancy. This means having extra systems ready in case the main system fails. For example, the company could use backup servers, backup internet connections, and cloud services. If one system goes down, another system can take over.
I would also use monitoring tools. These tools watch systems all the time and alert IT teams when something looks wrong. This helps the company fix problems early before they become bigger.
Cybersecurity protections are also important for availability. Firewalls, antivirus tools, access controls, patching, and DDoS protection can help stop attacks that try to shut systems down. Employee training is also needed because human mistakes can cause outages too.