IT resilience: acting instead of reacting

Many companies only react when their IT is actively attacked. It makes more sense to secure core systems and applications in advance with robust resilience strategies and to completely avoid costly downtimes.

 

Cyberattacks on companies are becoming more and more frequent. The more digital a company works, the more vulnerable it is and the more expensive IT downtime becomes. Those who implement resilience strategies in good time can avoid costly failures. We show what such strategies can look like.

 

View the entire customer journey

Rather than focusing on individual applications, companies should first understand how all of their applications, API calls, and third-party dependencies work together to achieve the desired outcome of the customer journey. In the next step, they can analyze which components are prevented from completing the customer journey due to possible downtime.

 

Risk-based approach

Resilience is not just a question of IT infrastructure. A two-pronged, risk-based approach suggests itself. On the one hand, priorities should be set for risky journeys. On the other hand, the risk profile of the corresponding technology components should be calculated in order to be able to develop a risk reduction plan for this specific asset.

 

Make IT operating data usable using AI

With the help of artificial intelligence, data sets that are distributed across different tools within a company can be efficiently linked. As a result, incidents can be identified much more quickly.

 

Build infrastructure capacities

In order to be prepared for a surprise increase in digital data traffic of 300 to 500 percent, companies should build infrastructure capacities. With containerized applications, for example, capacity can be quickly increased in all components of the technical stack and bottlenecks in the middleware can be eliminated.

 

Invest in know-how

Investments in new talents with specific know-how or in the further training of existing employees can support the introduction of modern technical measures. By implementing such measures, the operating time can ultimately be optimized, and IT problems can be identified early and quickly resolved through appropriate automation.

 

Establish quality and consistency standards

Corporate cultures based on quality and consistency standards are more resilient because they see crises as opportunities to learn. Managers should exemplify this mindset and encourage their teams to internalize the corresponding messages – acting instead of reacting.

 

Automate controls, identify problems in time

Enterprises need to identify IT weaknesses before they spread system-wide. Establishing controls and automating them helps identify problems quickly, fix them faster, and consequently minimize their impact.

Source: Security Insider