How Important Is It For Companies To Be Equipped With Systems Resilience: Accenture

According to Accenture’s Systems Resilience POV, based on the Future Systems research survey conducted across 8,300 companies before the COVID-19 crisis, only 10 percent of the companies had cracked the code on systems resilience.The research further stated that there was a massive difference in resilience between the leaders and their peers within the industry as a whole. In this regard, how must companies devise their strategies that could directly impact their business operations, thereby what actions must be taken now and also in the near future that would help in establishing long term strategies for more fruitful.

Ramnath Venkataraman, Senior Managing Director, Lead – Integrated Global Services, Accenture Technology shows us the way forward.

What benefits does systems resilience offer clients? 

Systems resilience describes a system’s ability to operate during a major disruption or crisis, with minimal impact on critical business and operational processes. This means preventing outages, mitigating their impact, or recovering from them.

Accenture’s research across 8,300 companies reveals that only a small minority—the top 10 percent—have cracked the code on systems resilience. For the rest, it is crucial to understand the vulnerabilities that could imperil survival—and dynamically prioritize and take swift action. This helps companies:

1. Immediately mobilise resources to focus on business continuity in critical areas.
2. Implement quick wins to address current challenges, minimizing risk and loss.
3. Position themselves to face complex challenges today and lay a foundation for the future.

How does the Accenture Systems Resilience Diagnostic help? Could you give an example?

With Accenture’s Systems Resilience Diagnostic Toolkit, organizations can prioritize their critical business processes and systems, and identify potential vulnerabilities. The diagnostic toolkit includes industry-specific heatmaps of business functions and processes that identify which business areas are vulnerable (high priority) and which are not (low priority). Once a systems view is overlaid on the processes, organizations can prioritize critical systems to focus on in the near term. Further, it helps organizations to measure and score their critical processes and systems based on a resilience index, identify areas of low resilience and interdependencies between them, and recommend immediate actions. The areas of low resilience are a starting point for applying the building blocks of systems resilience—elastic digital workplace, hyper-automation, architecture performance engineering, cloud acceleration and optimization, service continuity and cybersecurity.

With COVID-19, organisations are seeing increased demand via their systems of engagement (apps, websites). How is cloud helping them with this?

Cloud has a clear and increasingly important role to play in accelerating business strategies, now more than ever. By implementing cloud solutions, organizations can remain resilient in the short term by managing infrastructure risk, mitigating the dependency on people to maintain data centers, deploying instant innovation and aligning technology cost to rapid fluctuations in business demand. For example, a North American retailer used the cloud for AI-enabled forecasting, accurate allocation and an automated inbound track-and-trace solution to enable the availability of promotional products and essential merchandise in more than 1,200 stores during the COVID-19 crisis.

How should companies that had no cloud infrastructure before the pandemic look at adopting cloud technologies to get started? How quickly can an organisation with legacy infrastructure get on the cloud?

Until COVID-19, organizations didn’t feel a sense of urgency to accelerate cloud adoption, it has not become a urgent mandate in a bid to retain business continuity. The benefits of cloud are well-known—lower IT costs, increased agility and faster innovation among them. But a cloud migration can be complex and disruptive. Every company will need to develop their own comprehensive plan for a cloud infrastructure through rapid cloud adoption, optimized new environments and services, and a focus on transformation of IT processes, responsibilities, and capabilities.

When working with clients, Accenture leverages its myNav solution, a cloud platform designed to provide clients an end-to-end ability to navigate the complexity of the cloud landscape and determine optimal cloud solutions that best fit their specific business requirements. This enables us to identify the right solution before “putting feet on the ground,” lowering risk and cost while maximizing value. 

What should organisations be more generally aware of with regards to cybersecurity during this time?

With the advent of COVID-19, organizations globally had to facilitate remote working at scale. This has created additional security threats as bad actors attempt to take advantage of the increased proportion of the workforce working in an unconventional surrounding. 

A top-down approach is crucial to providing adequate protection when it comes to cybersecurity. Building a culture of cybersecurity in the organizational DNA, maintaining secure systems, and continuous monitoring are essential to mitigating these risks when facing an immediate “forced remote work” scenario. Some of the key actions that organizations can take include:

• Adopting a Zero Trust framework by building context-aware security policies and enabling secure, always-on connectivity
• Protecting against emerging threats by building analytics and integrating automation for security technologies and monitoring solutions
• Accelerating adoption of the cybersecurity fundamentals with a specific focus on cloud and distributed workforce.