Discussion – Protecting Availability

• If I was the CISO of a publicly traded company system availability wouldn’t just be an expectation it would be a requirement. Downtime leads to lost revenue, compliance risks, and a flood of concerns from leadership. My approach to ensuring availability is practical, layered, and built for resilience. I think redundancy is key. No single points of failure. We implement failover solutions, multi-region cloud deployments, and high availability clusters so that if one system fails, another immediately takes over. This ensures continuous operation without disruption. DDoS protection would be a must. Bad actors will inevitably try to flood our networks with traffic, so we deploy cloud-based mitigation, traffic filtering, and rate limiting to keep them at bay. Proactive defense means we can stay ahead of potential disruptions. Disaster recovery and incident response are non negotiable. We would maintain regularly tested backups and well documented recovery plans. We would simulate real incidents through tabletop exercises and red team assessments to keep our response sharp. Automated patching and continuous monitoring are also critical. Vulnerabilities get patched on schedule and AI driven anomaly detection spots unusual activity before it turns into an outage. Finally, zero trust architecture and least privilege access help contain threats if an attacker does get in. They won’t have free reign and we can keep damage to a minimum. At the end of the day availability is only noticed when it fail so my job is to make sure that never happens.