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Recovery time objectives (RTO) will continue to push into the sub-four-hour range, with
pressure mounting to move towards two hours or less. What’s important is to identify the
different layers in an environment and define your service level agreement against each. Also,
recognize that not every application is priority No. 1 or T1, and that physical assets may take
longer to recover than virtual assets.

This year, more companies will take steps to ensure their invaluable data is truly recoverable
through the cloud, even in the event it is lost, corrupted, damaged or destroyed.

Adoption of virtualization-ready apps will escalate.

As cloud technology matures and becomes more trusted, an increasing number of mission-
critical applications will be virtualized this year. This will make automated application-level
recovery a requirement.

It is now critical for the recovery of environments to enable complex applications to be part of
the recovery process and automation. Virtualized cloud recovery will evolve past just the data
and operating system and deeper into the application portfolio.

In addition, recovery environments will become agile in nature and leveraged for non-disaster
recovery application testing and development. With virtualized recovery and automation, these
environments are no longer just used for at time of test/at time of disaster (ATOT/ATOD)
purposes. Application developers will be able to leverage recovery environments for testing,
development and quality assurance easily instead of relying on separate environments for these
as in the past. From the perspective of CIOs, this enables them to maximize their IT
infrastructure costs by sharing assets across traditionally separate areas of the business.

Security partnership will be a necessity to survival.

A data breach is always disastrous and the repercussions almost always land on the CIO and
the IT staff since data protection is often assumed to be their responsibility. So as security
awareness rises, data security will be allocated more efficiently.

CIOs must build an ecosystem of trusted third-party advisors to best strengthen their defenses
against hackers. This sparks growing interest in managed security services. Partnerships
between enterprises and security service managers will rise sharply in 2015 as interest in
cybersecurity – largely sparked by the Obama administration’s efforts to curb breaches –
intensifies.

Additionally, CIOs will strengthen partnerships with numerous internal departments – from the
marketing team to the general counsel – to educate employees on how to avoid being the next
breachable link.

26 Cyber Warnings E-Magazine – March 2015 Edition
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