In today’s climate, business continuity planning isn’t optional, it’s essential. Each year, hurricanes and natural disasters disrupt operations across the Gulf Coast, costing businesses days or even weeks of productivity. At GDS, we’ve developed a multi-layered hurricane readiness strategy centered around our proprietary remote access solution: NOMAD™.

Organizations of all sizes and in every sector must comply with a growing number of cyber security laws and regulations. Although the U.S. doesn’t have an overarching security and privacy law like the E.U.’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), the federal government has an alphabet soup of mandates covering various types of data. State government agencies and even many private sector organizations must comply with these rules.

On June 18, 2024, CDK Global was hit with a ransomware attack that took down many of its core systems. While it was attempting to recover from that incident, the company was hit with a second cyberattack. CDK Global provides management systems for car dealerships, and more than 15,000 new car dealers suffered downtime due to the incident. It took more than two weeks for all systems to be restored. A consulting firm estimates that the attack collectively cost the dealerships more than $1 billion.

Traditionally, the IT industry has focused heavily on hardware. Organizations purchased, implemented, configured and maintained an array of hardware assets, periodically upgrading them to take advantage of the latest technology. Despite the advent of the cloud and the growing emphasis on applications, many organizations still have a large fleet of IT hardware assets.