Nine steps to making your business technologically resilient

No question anymore that staying competitive means engaging your organization in a digital transformation involving the replacement/modernization of legacy systems and an expanded ability to exploit ever-increasing volumes of data.

Unquestionably, the technologies at the heart of digital transformation — implementations of multi-cloud and hybrid cloud architectures that support greater deployment of mobile devices and include IoT (Internet of Things) as well as AI-based analytics, commerce and collaboration platforms, dev/ops, and much more — are mission-critical.

But none of these technologies or the innovative business models they support can help your bottom line when they’re disrupted. And they’re disrupted a lot: 91% of those queried in one recent study experienced tech-related business downtime during the past two years.

So how can you sustain both digital transformation and business resilience?

The answer, of course, will be unique to your business, but I offer you these nine starters:

1. Make sure you’ve asked and answered basic business continuity planning questions, including…
  - What are the greatest risks/vulnerabilities our organization faces — including supply chain exposures?
  - What steps have we taken to respond to these risks and sustain/recover our most important operations in timely fashion? What else do we need to do — e.g., train employees about social media hygiene?
  - How do our digital infrastructure and technologies currently enable us to sustain/recover key operations? How should we improve this — e.g., by always making cybersecurity a primary consideration?
  - What’s the best way to systematically roll out needed changes?
  - How should our digital infrastructure and technologies be updated over time to adapt to our evolving needs?

1. Deploy tools that integrate data protection and cybersecurity;

1. Deploy tools that support unified management of all data sources — this means on-premises data centers as well as all public cloud services data, etc.);

1. Use cloud-based services that integrate data backup/protection and disaster recovery;

1. Don’t forget to protect your as-a-service applications with cloud-based backup;

1. Regularly test your organization’s ability to recover your backed-up data;

1. Move beyond event logs to root cause analysis tools that can be used to investigate, diagnose, and resolve operational issues in near real time;

1. Feed historical and performance data into analytical engines that can generate proactive recommendations — e.g., how policy should be configured so a particular workload achieves its recovery point and recovery time objectives; and

Consider engaging a managed services provider with the right mix of experience, a technical reach that spans the full lifecycle of your resilience needs, and the ability to both customize their services to fit your requirements and deliver fast, knowledgeable support.