Nine tips for building an effective digital resilience strategy

What is digital resilience?

Why is digital resilience critical for organizations?

• Customer satisfaction and digital user experience is the primary goal of any business.
• Business continuity helps organizations protect their reputation.
• Increased productivity fosters effective incident response and recovery.
  

Digital resilience challenges

• Data centers are critical for business continuity in this digital realm. Their continued uptime and performance are vital for dependent businesses.
• The limited visibility due to minimal or no availability and performance monitoring. This is often the result of using numerous siloed monitoring systems with no event correlation.
• Distributed systems, hybrid cloud adoption, and microservice architecture make it increasingly difficult to understand the business infrastructure and its dependency.
• Organizations are dealing with limited budgets that focus on digitization and not maintenance.
• The absence of chaos engineering practices due to reasons like lack of awareness, resistance to change, and legacy tech stacks that are not designed for those practices.
  

• Hardware failures, power outages, and natural disasters in data centers.
• Performance issues and outages with content delivery networks (CDNs).
• Network congestion and routing issues due to internet service providers (ISPs).
• Insecure code with security loopholes.
• Weak or misconfigured SSL/TLS encryption, which can expose data to interception.
  

How to achieve digital resilience

Steps for effective digital resilience

1. Balancing feature development and shipping bug-free code
   In the process of time-bound feature releases, proper testing is often compromised. Testing non-functional elements is as important as testing functional elements, which can be done using fully automated testing. Proactively automate common issue resolution with AI and ML, reducing the time spent on mundane tasks.
2. Building digitally immune systems
   Unprecedented operational challenges are quite common in building resilient systems. To prevent applications and services from being compromised, organizations must implement well-experimented, thought-out practices and designs right from software design, development, testing, and operations to analysis.  
3. Risk assessment and analysis
   Failing to identify potential risks can result in unexpected disruptions and vulnerabilities. Purposely introduce failures, test resilience, and identify weak spots by following chaos engineering practices that can observe and analyze the results, reiterate chaos engineering processes, and remediate weak spots to avoid such issues.
4. Developing a digital resilience strategy
   Lack of a well-defined plan can lead to half-baked ad-hoc measures that may lead to chaos at the time of actual incidents. Draft well-defined objectives, recovery plans, roles, and responsibilities to attend to disruptions and quickly recover from incidents.
5. Cross-functional collaboration
   Siloed teams and lack of collaboration can slow down resilience efforts. Foster communication across IT administration, security, and operations teams to collaborate effectively and bounce back quickly.
6. Continuous monitoring and issue detection
   Inadequate monitoring may cause a delay in detecting and responding to issues. Implement a monitoring system with real-time alerting capabilities that can immediately notify the right team. AI-powered tools that can predict and alert about potential anomalies in advance are an added advantage.
7. User experience monitoring across digital services
   Not worrying about the user experience is like buying an expensive car and never servicing it or watching its performance. Frequent outages and inconsistent user experiences may cause dissatisfaction in user minds, tarnishing your brand reputation.
   Your customers should be able to access various cloud services across all touch points within your brand seamlessly. This may be your website, mobile app, data collection form, or desktop or web application. Continuously monitor user experience across all digital business facets and analyze the back end for issues affecting customer satisfaction. Run both synthetics and real user behavior analysis for a complete UX analysis.
8. Business continuity strategy
   Data loss can bring the business to a standstill if proper backup and recovery plans are not in place. Back up data periodically, and test effective sync and recovery regularly. Redundancy is an important part of resilience and to ensure business continuity.
9. Third-party risk management
   Organizations are bound to use different third-party tools for servers, databases, cache, CI/CD, etc. Overlooking the security vulnerabilities in these tools may serve as the entry point for various attacks.

The role of Site24x7 in achieving digital resilience

• Eliminate blind spots with complete visibility into the availability and performance of your digital assets, including websites and applications.
• Deliver a seamless UX as Site24x7 thoroughly monitors your CDNs, APIs, ISP, SSL/TLS, and all other backbone internet services, guaranteeing a stable digital presence.
• Accelerate early issue detection and efficient capacity planning by monitoring your hybrid cloud infrastructure.
• Trace application dependency and infrastructure components that affect performance, and resolve issues faster by pointing out the exact line of erroneous code. 
• Get smarter with AIOps. Study trends, identify anomalies, and receive instant alerts using AI- and ML-powered insights. Also, configure automatic incident remediation to avoid manual intervention.
• Implement strategies to mitigate attacks by analyzing your organization's security posture. 
• Communicate your service availability status with your customers.
  

Summing up