Telcos and cloud in top five most critical industries

The utilities sector is the most critical industry in the world in terms of the potential impact of an outage, according to an expert panel convened by Vertiv.

The panel of global critical infrastructure experts ranked mass transit as second, followed by telecommunications, oil and gas, then cloud and co-location.

Industries were evaluated based on 15 criteria to assess the potential impacts from the loss of availability of critical systems. These included the impact on human health, the maintenance of societal order, the financial impact, the effect on the environment and the cost of recovery.

The industries were given a criticality score for each category, which was averaged to determine the ranking.

“If there is a common theme at the top of this list, it is the interconnectedness of these industries,” Vertiv VP for market development Jack Pouchet said.

“These sectors are important to the foundation of today’s society, and downtime in any of these areas can reverberate across industries and around the globe. This will only continue as our world becomes more mobile and more connected and as the Internet of Things expands.”

In terms of purely financial impact, the financial sector is considered the most exposed, followed by e-commerce then cloud and co-location.

The cloud and co-location sector’s high score on both rankings is due to the increased uptake of such services across businesses in multiple industries and their growing dependence on these platforms, Vertiv said.

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