Many of the top companies in the United States that I have experience use a website or an application to sell goods and services. For example Amazon and Walmart sell goods on their prospective websites. Wells Fargo, JPMorgan Chase and American Express also use their websites to manage money and assets of their customers. Which would mean that availability would be at the forefront for all of these companies. Their down time would have to be very close to zero because the amount of money they make per day can be upwards of a couple million dollars. 

So as a CISO for a publicly traded company my first protection to ensure availability would be failover clusters. Failover clusters are secondary servers that can take over the function when the primary one fails. So just in case a server does decide to go down we can immediately switch to our second one. The second protection I would recommend would be a backup generator. When I was working at Best Buy we had worked through a couple storms and at times our power would go out depending on the size of the storm. Fortunately for Best Buy the building had a backup generator so that inconvenience would not interrupt the business and customers were able to still purchase things they needed. My third protection for big companies would be to develop a hot site. “A hot site is a location that is set up and ready to go — that is, one can arrive and continue to work immediately. A hot backup site will have equipment set up with your current data available when you walk in, with all primary data center functions copied and maintained off site” (Sullivan, 2018). For companies like Amazon and Walmart that are worth billions of dollars and make millions per day in sales, having the ability to just have another location ready to get up and running immediately is critical to the bottom line and the future trust of the consumer. 

Reference

Sullivan, E. (2018, November 26). What’s the difference between a hot site and cold site for Dr?: TechTarget. Disaster Recovery.https://www.techtarget.com/searchdisasterrecovery/answer/ Whats-the-difference-between-a-hot-site-and-cold-site-for-disaster-recovery