Tech giant Accenture has released a new research detailing six building blocks of systems resilience, as well as recommended actions, for organizations to take moving forward, especially in relation to future disruptions.
The company said the unfolding Covid-19 crisis is putting systems resilience to the test like never before. IT and business leaders, it said, must ensure that their organizations can continue to operate through the unprecedented disruption by quickly addressing the stability of critical business processes and underlying systems.
Systems resilience describes a system’s ability to operate during a major disruption or crisis, with minimal impact on critical business and operational processes. This means preventing outages, mitigating their impact, or recovering from them.
“Based on our research, most companies are already starting with a significant gap in systems resilience. In 2019, Accenture conducted a vast survey of 8,300 companies that revealed only a small minority have cracked the code on systems resilience,” the company said.
Accenture said companies should build up their capacity using the six building blocks of systems resilience:
1. Elastic Digital Workplace
Quickly enable remote work with a focus on culture, technologies, communications and policies — at extraordinary speed and scale.
- Immediately help employees adapt to remote working (e.g. effectively run virtual meetings).
- Deploy or scale collaboration tools and provide guidance for operating in a remote connected workplace.
- Organize an Elastic Digital Workplace Task Force including business, HR, IT and security leaders.
- Equip traditional desktop workers with mobile solutions and implement virtual desktop solutions.
2. Hyper Automation
Accelerate existing automation investments to mitigate the impact of systems disruption, free up human resource capacity and streamline IT workforce management.
- Identify and prioritize bottleneck areas.
- Implement automation to immediately resolve high-volume tasks by leveraging techniques like machine learning and AI models.
- Augment that which cannot be completely automated with digital co-workers.
- Optimize the deployment of human talent to focus on high touch activities.
3. Architecture & Performance Engineering
Quickly resolve critical systems availability and performance constraints and scale applications to meet business demand.
- Set up a triage room to get quick consensus on problems and priorities to address first.
- Identify and implement quick performance engineering wins such as optimizing application memory, architecture-caching and data-indexing.
- Quickly scale application capabilities through configuration or commercial changes.
- Apply rapid architecture remediation techniques, such as streaming data, to offload demand on critical systems.
4. Cloud Acceleration & Optimization
Navigate extreme surges or drops in demand, manage risk, deploy instant innovation and optimize cloud costs.
- Reconfigure traffic to maximize capacity for critical applications and infrastructure.
- Leverage the power of cloud to deploy instant innovation through new cloud-native solutions.
- Take advantage of cloud’s pay-by-the-drink model to align technology costs to drops in demand.
5. Service Continuity
Quickly source and onboard skilled resources to support critical in-flight services or deliver new IT projects.
- Find the right skilled resources and initiate knowledge transition.
- Enable accelerated service readiness.
- Support service continuity through fit-for-purpose modern engineering practices and lean governance.
6. Cybersecurity
Secure your customers, people and systems wherever they are to counter the bad actors who seek to take advantage during a crisis.
- Rapidly deploy a Zero Trust model for multi-cloud solutions, individually-owned devices (BYOD) and third-party technologies.
- Identify security abnormalities and events.
- Institute daily situational threat intelligence briefings virtually.
- Remind employees and third parties to remain vigilant as cyberthreat tactics increase.
- Build analytics and automation for monitoring solutions.
