Redundancy does not ensure resilience
For years, IT has built redundancy into systems and processes. We design high-availability architectures with duplicated components and implement offsite backups along with standby data centers. And we put manual processes in place, ready to use as a workaround in case of an outage
These are the actions that ensure that the business survives when normality is interrupted. But redundancy is built on the assumption that the environment is fundamentally unchanged. While you can restore services or implement a workaround to fix a problem, it does not help you to adapt or to deal with permanent environment changes.
So how can you improve digital resilience so that your business can quickly adapt and thrive, even when the unexpected occurs?
Go extreme with your automation plans
Whether you are operating a security operations center (SOC) or a network operations center (NOC), your job is getting more difficult every day. An increasingly complex, hybrid IT environment with dramatically growing volumes of data makes it impossible for mere humans to deal with evolving threats and disruptions.
Technologies such as containers, microservices, and cloud services help provide resilience through dynamic infrastructure, but they also increase the attack surface. The sheer complexity and levels of abstraction involved make it harder for SOC and NOC teams to effectively understand and respond to incidents.
To make your IT ecosystem resilient, you need automated provisioning, constant discovery, and intelligent monitoring. You need systems that can self-heal, learn from past events and actions, and adapt in real time. You also need the analytics and insight that can understand complex relationships, cut through the noise, and quickly identify threats and isolate the root cause of problems.
AI-driven operations (AIOps) learns from the events, actions taken, and outcomes, evolving over time to automatically predict and respond to problems before customers are affected. Machine learning allows huge volumes of data to be ingested and analyzed at high speed.
For IT Ops teams, automated remediation (self-healing) can dramatically speed up the resolution of incidents and restore service without human involvement. An AIOps platform identifies a problem and initiates restoration actions while alerting operations teams and informing the service desk.
From a cyber-resilience perspective, security orchestration and remediation (SOAR) tools ensure that an enterprise can respond quickly to threats or attacks, both internal and external. These are both great examples of extreme automation for IT operations.
Orchestrate your business process
Extreme automation can help with more than just running and securing the digital enterprise. Process orchestration can dramatically speed up back-office business processes and save costs.
From a resilience perspective, automating highly manual business processes does more than remove the dependency on