By Mohan Subrahmanya, Country Leader – India & Director, Insight Enterprises
In today’s interconnected world, tech-led resilience is paramount for organisations to withstand and adapt to disruptive events. A recent McKinsey report quotes resilience as a metric for assessing the criticality of a business process, the capability of the underlying technology, the potential business impact of technology failure, and the organisation’s risk tolerance. The same study shows that 1 out of 5 leading organisations across the world have been forced to rebuild their IT systems from scratch after a disastrous event.
This highlights the fact that every enterprise should have a tech-led resilience strategy when building or upgrading its IT infrastructure. The core goal of building IT resilience is to maintain uninterrupted business operations during and after disruptions while safeguarding data, protecting profitability, and upholding the organisation’s reputation and customer trust.
The approach to tech-led resilience
Building tech-led resilience requires planning not only architecture but also design, deployment, and regular monitoring. The supporting technologies should exhibit agility, scalability, recoverability, and comprehensive capability. Resilient IT architecture should have heightened visibility and transparency across the technology stack to keep an organisation functioning in the event of a catastrophic system failure. It must involve proactively assessing potential threats, designing systems to minimise vulnerabilities, and building mechanisms for rapid recovery. The architecture should have the ability to learn from disruptions, adapt to changing conditions, and predict new challenges.
The tech trinity
When building resilience, organisations need to design systems with built-in redundancy, failover mechanisms, and disaster recovery capabilities to facilitate swift recovery. Cloud infrastructure and computing solutions, cybersecurity solutions, and artificial intelligence are the key components for today’s organisations to build tech-led resilience.
Now, let’s look at how each of these components help build IT resilience:
Cloud computing
Cloud computing has become the go-to technology owing to its reduced cost impact, business and performance acceleration, agility and efficiency it provides. Cloud-based IT architecture creates the foundation for scalability and redundancy. A cloud platform’s ability to rapidly deploy new services, experiment with cutting-edge technologies, and pivot quickly is invaluable. It enables the systems to handle fluctuating workloads and ensure continuous operations even if components fail. We find that a strong cloud-based IT infrastructure allows rapid recovery through automated backup, snapshots, and failover mechanisms, minimising the impact of unforeseen events. Most cloud service providers not only offer enhanced security capabilities, but also DRaaS (Disaster Recovery as a Service) with cloud-based backup and recovery that ensure quick system restoration and continuity in running business processes.
Cybersecurity
Cyber resilience is a crucial aspect of IT resilience as it enhances an organisation’s ability to withstand and recover from cyber threats while maintaining business continuity. Unlike traditional cybersecurity strategy that focuses mainly on system protection and defense, cyber resilience focuses on using security solutions that pre-empt threats, defend from attacks and ensure that the processes quickly bounce back from attacks. Cyber resilience minimises IT downtime and work disruptions for an organisation.
A robust security framework, essential for cyber resilience includes Zero Trust Architecture. It entails continuous verification of users and devices regardless of their location which helps prevent unauthorised access. Having a zero-trust model also limits lateral movement during breaches. Other aspects of a comprehensive cybersecurity framework include risk management, vulnerability assessments, and predictive security controls that preempt security breaches and protect systems. Having a good incident response and recovery plan is crucial. Regularly testing the security system’s incident response ensures an effective reaction to potential cyberattacks.
To be a cyber-resilient organisation, having the right security technology is not enough, involving the people using the systems within your organisation is equally important. Educating employees on cybersecurity best practices, recognising phishing attempts, and avoiding risky behaviors significantly reduces the likelihood of successful attacks.
Artificial intelligence and machine learning
AI is rapidly becoming a crucial cog in any IT resilience architecture. In fact, AI helps enhance the benefits of cloud computing and cybersecurity solutions. AI can analyse vast amounts of data to detect patterns and anomalies, which are indicative of potential failures or security threats. ML models learn from historical data to predict future vulnerabilities. This enables proactive issue resolution before problems escalate.
Increasingly, AI is being used to automate tasks such as vulnerability scanning, patch management, and security alerts, allowing tech professionals in the company to focus on more complex challenges. AI enhances cybersecurity measures by monitoring user and network behavior, identifying zero-day threats, strengthening phishing and spam detection, and optimising network security.
Overall, AI enables tech-led resilience by making systems smarter, more adaptive, and better equipped to handle disruption, helping organisations stay robust, agile, and competitive in uncertain times.
By leveraging the synergistic power of cloud, AI, and robust cybersecurity practices, organisations can strengthen their ability to withstand shocks, recover quickly, and leverage new opportunities to gain a competitive advantage.