Managing risk: The view from the private sector

Myron Hrycyk, chief information officer at NYK Logistics UK, says: “I’ve put a lot of effort into ensuring we can deliver a reliable, sustainable operational side of the business – and to deliver that, you go through everything: the servers, the data centres and the networks.”

The approach also stretches across areas such as virus attacks, hacking and penetration testing, through to disaster recovery and high availability strategies.

“Then you can become more proactive by having what we call our service availability pools, where we go out and seek areas of our infrastructure which might be at risk,” says Hrycyk.

“You have to take a holistic view of risk management. Our strategy is not just about viruses. We also need to consider other areas, such as the availability of the network or the resilience of the servers.”

NYK pays external hackers to undertake rigorous penetration testing, buying in the services of yesterday’s hack-happy teenagers to ensure another corner of the corporate world is a little bit safer than it might otherwise have been.

Hrycyk also takes no chances with the company’s infrastructure in the event of a disaster.

“The traditional issues of high availability and disaster recovery are absolutely fundamental to the business,” he says.

“We need to maintain corporate services by being able to switch IT services from an area that has been subject to a disaster somewhere else. In our sector we run 24/7 - and our clients expect us to be able to provide a seamless service.”

NYK runs twin data centres, with triangulated communications; if one data centre is subject to flood or fire, Hrycyk and his team can move to another site with minimal impact.

“We have to mirror data between the two sites,” he says. “High availability means you can switch staff over to the alternative provision when you need to. This is just as fundamental as having your virus software up to date and che cking the state of your network.”

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