Ensono: Users expect high speed and availability, and outages can severely impact brand reputation

Oliver Presland, VP, Consulting Services Portfolio Ensono discusses the impact of the pandemic on user expectations and the security landscape

Computing caught up with Oliver Presland, VP, Consulting Services Portfolio from Ensono to discuss the impact of the Coronavirus pandemic on user expectations, and how the security landscape is evolving.

Computing: What trends have we seen in companies delivering on customer expectations and how has that shaped their disaster recovery solutions?

Oliver Presland: The growing trend over the last five years has been increased user expectations in the availability of services, speed of responses and overall standard of customer experiences. Users have come to expect rapid, high-quality service 24 hours, 365 days a year. This trend only accelerated during the pandemic, with many companies pivoting their entire service delivery to digital channels - often overnight.

In order to underpin the delivery of these user expectations, you need highly available systems and - regardless of whether your systems are in the cloud or a data centre - if the systems are business critical or are public-facing then an outage can have a significant negative impact on brand reputation. And with these new user expectations, a lot of brands feel the responsibility to invest in these systems to ensure they can provide the expected high availability - a core part of this strategy is investment in disaster recovery solutions.

Facing this increased pressure of high user expectations, many businesses have felt the need to demonstrate a quick and efficient disaster recovery plan, so they can show that, in the worst case scenario, these systems will be back up and be running in a set amount of time.

CTG: What sort of security threats are you seeing this year?

OP: Since the pandemic began there has been a widely reported uptick in nearly all types of cybersecurity attacks, including the probing of commercial websites, distributed denial of service (DDoS) and others. We have seen a growing pattern of DDoS attacks being used as a smokescreen to distract from a secondary attack to penetrate vulnerable systems. These increased attacks have meant a rise in the demand for specialists to handle these threats.

This increase in attacks may be because, in order to tackle the pandemic, companies have faced pressure to scale up their IT services in order to support remote working and increased demand for online services. There's a risk with these tactical changes, which are often made in haste, that the security protection around them will be incomplete - presenting an opportunity for attackers to expose vulnerabilities in rapid implementations of new and scaled systems.

CTG: How is the security landscape likely to change in 2021?

OP: A lot of companies are now taking stock of their IT as they move into 2021 as many have changed and adapted so quickly. Many companies may have moved to the cloud in order to have the ability to scale based on a period of unpredictable demand. And now, their approach will no longer be tactical but strategic, looking at how they can handle demand more cost effectively in the long-term, with their cost following the demand rather than implementing overcapacity in the short-term. This means as companies look into long-term protection of these systems, there will be a greater demand for services such as security assessments, vulnerability scanning, penetration testing and cloud-based DDoS protection so they can keep these systems as secure as possible.

CTG: What are the future security plans for Ensono?

OP: We have always offered a broad range of security services to our clients, providing them with the protection they need. In response to client demand, we are expanding our security, advisory and consulting capabilities to help clients identify weaknesses in their systems and put measures in place, which we can provide as a service with support available 24/7 to protect them from threats.

For more from Ensono on how to modernise the systems formerly known as AS/400, click here.

This article was produced in partnership with Ensono