“The defense industry has extremely high standards for their critical systems as they may be required to support live command-and-control for battlefield operations. Life and death decisions are made based on the information provided by critical systems. ”
TONY GAUNT,
senior director of colocation, cloud, and banking,
financial services and insurance in Asia for Vertiv
Considering the critical role the defense industry plays in national security, it’s not surprising to find it ranked as one of the most critical industries.
In addition to its role protecting lives, defense scored highly based on the immediacy of impact, potential broad scope of downtime, and potential for societal disruption. Because of the stakes involved, the defense industry typically invests heavily in reliability, redundancy and security to protect critical systems. It is also an industry that tends toward secrecy, establishing its own specifications for critical systems and requiring strict conformance to specifications and high levels of availability from its vendors. “If there’s downtime in the defense industry, you’re probably not going to hear about it,” Gaunt explained.
