Redefining Business Resiliency for the New Normal
By Himanshu Dubey | August 13, 2020
The world is experiencing a new reality and a time that no one had ever expected. These ongoing events that we face today, were not outlined in the scope of any business resiliency plan. Organizations might have planned for natural disasters, power outages and other emergencies, but disruption like these were out of our imagination.
And looking at the future, what we need to learn from this is that, disruptions to business operations can come from anywhere, not just a pandemic our continuity plans should be flexible enough to handle the new normal .
In this digital age, the business resiliency of any organization completely depends upon its IT. Its role is to combine people, process and right technologies to ensure availability of critical business applications. The unique challenges that organizations face today have tested their IT flexibility like never. Some of these challenges include:
- Quick adoption of remote work practices & tools
- Managing costs during economic uncertainty
- Scale IT infrastructure support rising application demands
These can only be tackled using a proactive business resiliency strategy which is crucial to enable digital business. Let’s see a few approaches that will help companies during these tough times and prepare an agile organization for future.
Today, enabling remote work is the top priority for organizations across the globe. This has increased the demand for SaaS-based collaborative apps. These apps always ensure on and off-site presence without causing disruption to the business. The need for both remote support services – professional services and cloud software have significantly jumped. We are also witnessing a demand boost in particularly collaboration suites, identity, security, VPNs, end-point encryption.
With employees working remotely, attempting to sustain their productivity and stay digitally connected, the cloud has emerged as a savior. Companies that were already on cloud are able to successfully meet the extraordinary rise in demand. As per IDC’s latest survey, it is found that as a result of the spread of the pandemic, 64% of the organizations in India are expected to increase demand for cloud computing. The following abilities of cloud makes it compelling for adoption:
- scale dynamically as the demand grows
- availability of validated enterprise solutions for remote working like VDI
- Cloud based access gateways
- SaaS based application delivery
According to Cisco (Global Cloud Index: 2016-2021), 85% of new app workload instances are container-based. This rise of modern cloud native application architecture has also resulted in an increased cloud adoption.
Organizations can easily rely on cloud during capacity spikes and demanding hours. In the backend, they should have a self-healing infrastructure based on AI and advanced tools like predictive analytics, DR automation, load balancing that can survive gracefully during the need of hour. But for all of this to work, a great deal of forecasting and pro-active strategy is required.
Looking at the costs, as a customer, one should understand and quantify the revenue leakage caused by a disruption. At the same time the leakage must be compared with the overall cost of possible solution that can avoid this problem. A service-based model can always help to manage and streamline costs where it is necessary. Also, it allows to optimize its distribution based on changing business needs. This shows what role cloud and services can play going ahead in time.
The organizations can also explore managed service providers, which can save them huge costs on IT staffing and initial investments. It offers you peace of mind by offloading all the complex tasks to the firms who are best at this job and, what you get are the outcomes based on SLAs. Some big advantages that comes with cloud are the OpEx model of cloud, which is pay per use, and reduced management overhead. Most of the organizations want to move out from the ownership model and want to adopt this pay per use model of cloud, and the organizations that have been reluctant for cloud adoption should rethink and re-evaluate their parameters of consideration.
Apart from the technological advantages of different approaches we just discussed, we should always remember that at last, it is people who drive change in an organization. Maybe not now, but sometime later, eventually all of us will be comfortable with this new reality and will realize how much more productive we can be in this new normal. But, if an organization is still stressed seeing its employees working and collaborating outside the office, then the issue is not the technology. The issue lies in the culture and trust.