Higher education is a hot spot for physical and digital threats. However, digital threats have pushed the world of higher education to a breaking point, with ransomware becoming one of the most devastating threats to higher education in recent years.

CTOs are at the forefront of technological innovation and strategy and are often burdened with fulfilling multiple roles. As business challenges mount, they must find ways to balance technology, teams, and processes to maximize their bottom line. However, it’s not all smooth sailing for these C-level executives. Four challenges often get in the way of CTOs looking to maximize growth and impact the business bottom line.

A rise in both physical and digital security threats is placing greater pressure on CISOs and other security professionals to prepare for and mitigate evolving security threats of all kinds. To protect organizations and their people, security teams need to be able to visualize threats, respond quickly and communicate effectively.

Some critical events may be familiar to organizations, they may happen repeatedly or even on a set schedule. Others may present new challenges that responders haven’t seen or experienced before. In a worst-case scenario, events could even happen concurrently, forcing responders to split their attention while trying to anticipate and account for the combined effects.

Accelerated trends toward hybrid and remote work compounded with the increasing frequency of critical events — such as severe weather, violence, and other threats — have made it more difficult for organizations to keep their people safe. Thankfully, today’s HR professionals are rising to the challenge with the help of technology.

As critical events increase in frequency and magnitude, organizations need to ensure that building and maintaining operational resilience is incorporated into their long-term strategy. Operational resilience is more than just having a plan to respond to critical events as they happen; it’s a critical step built into every strategy to ensure that businesses are prepared to face the unexpected.

Your IT team just finished resolving a complex incident, customer service finished their last call about the issue, and your business is back to being fully operational. Now that the storm has passed, you should be planning a postmortem to determine the cause of the incident and lessons learned. Postmortems require specific data that can highlight where your team is succeeding and where they can improve.

Today’s global risk landscape has made digital and physical security even more complex and nuanced, especially considering major critical events like the invasion of Ukraine, which demonstrate that one massive critical event can create many others globally with far-reaching effects. These can include displacement of people, physical security threats, cyber-attacks, and other devastating impacts.

Reliability, scalability, and innovation are three terms at the forefront of any discussion about how businesses can achieve long-term success. When you put those three together, you create a business that’s capable of producing the best possible product with the least amount of waste, known simply as a lean enterprise. Being a lean enterprise is the ideal state for most organizations but becoming one can be an ambitious all-hands-on-deck undertaking. The best way to do this?

After a crisis, a human-made or natural disaster, or any other type of emergency, organizations need to resume day-to-day operations as quickly and as smoothly as possible. An organization’s ability to recover from a disaster requires careful planning, testable processes, and the right technology. According to a study from Ponemon Institute, the average cost of data center downtime is almost $9,000 per minute.