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More systems will become an essential part of your revenue stream. A data lake is not just a fancy dashboard anymore, that makes you happy in the morning on Monday.

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Such systems already fall into the category of the power grid infrastructure. Twenty years ago we needed to ensure that such systems have short, limited downtimes represented by gazillion of nines. Ten years ago we had to ensure that they are resilient with a fallback. Nowadays, we have AI & no-code, simple to use but more complex inside than ever. Systems generating recurring revenues must be no-issue.

How do we build such a system?

Snapshots and backups of your system make sure that you can carry out business. Any unexpected errors may occur, so you make them expected and plan ahead.

The standard threat modelling flow will deal with physical outages, ransomware including hackers, rogue groups and governments, finally insider threats such as on-site customers, contractors or employees.

OpenAI promotes the single person, billion-dollar company. As more and more billion-dollar single person companies are built the flow will change a bit.

You may want more from your security consultants. You will need requirements of a product instead of a service. We outlined the requirements of no-issue systems of the 2020s.

1. When you are notified of a downtime, you log in to a dashboard that reflects the issue right away. It provides a timeline to communicate to stakeholders, and any risks involved. You do not need to do anything, you do not need to call any consultants.

2. It is a famous anecdote in Silicon Valley about an intern, who figured out that Google could not be restored, if the system went down. They secured a full time job. I am not sure how accurate it is. You get information about the status of the no-issue system anytime. It monitors not just the live system, but it also performs mock restores to make sure any outages triggering it will not fail.

3. No-issue is proactive. You need to choose your system stack to be resilient. Email systems may have sharding errors, etc. The author suggests to track customer communication in multiple distinct systems. Salesforce helped us to be more direct, organized and focused in lead generation and opportunities together with keeping information in email and document storage. Similarly, using Quickbooks, NetApp, and an in house bookkeeping and accounting solution makes sure that the numbers can be verified at the end of periods. The author even uses a paper copy of the master book to double-check past numbers. One system can be the source of reporting, if all the numbers align in all of them. Professional companies run SQL queries in parallel systems from different vendors.

4. Backups are the weakest point of data protection. Oftentimes NDAs allow backups to be kept longer. They are also the most common scenarios that make fulfilling CCPA requirements expensive. Other standards like GDPR, etc. may apply to you. The best CSOs question the storage of data and logs based on the value they provide. Connect a revenue account to each gigabyte stored. Cut fixed costs.