The spectre of ransomware

Uptime Institute Intelligence plans to release its 2019/2020 outages report shortly. This report will examine the types, causes and impacts of public outages, as well as further analyze the results of a recent Uptime survey on outages and impacts. The data will once again show that serious IT service interruptions are common and costly, with the impacts often causing serious disruption.

We have excluded one type of outage from the report: those caused by cyberattacks. Data integrity and cybersecurity is, of course, a very major issue that requires vigilant attention and investment, but it is not currently an area on which Uptime Institute researches and advises. Most security issues are data breaches; although they have serious consequences, they do not usually lead to a service interruption.