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With increasing reliance on technology across all industries, IT resilience is a priority that no technology leader can afford to ignore. It’s a multi-layered problem: Are your systems — both internal and customer-facing — as robust and modern as possible? Do you have strong cyber security systems in place? Are you aware and ready to meet your organization’s current and future technology needs? Are you ready to respond quickly and decisively to outages and cyber attacks? Is your team trained and ready for new opportunities and threats on the horizon?
With all that is at stake, the ongoing work of monitoring and improving an organization’s IT resilience can seem overwhelming. However, with the right planning, tools and staffing, a technology leader can ensure that their team is prepared not only to overcome unexpected challenges but also to continuously improve the organization’s comprehensive technology systems. Below, 16 members of Forbes’ Tech Council share helpful tips to help.
Members pictured from left to right.
Photos courtesy of individual members.
1. Understand your risk tolerance
It is important to first understand your risk tolerance. Talk to your executive team to understand their recovery time objective – how quickly each information system needs to be restored – and their recovery point objective – how much data you can afford to lose (measured in time as a “T-disaster”). A business continuity strategy built around these factors means you’re ready for anything the world throws at you. – Rohan Roger, Optistar
2. Stay close to the overall organizational strategy
IT organizations will continue to experience rapid change. To improve IT resilience, stay close to the overall strategy and understand the key levers needed for success. Once things are moving and moving, always refer back to the business strategy and determine if your IT priorities are helping to move the needle and align with the strategic goal. This will serve as a guide to staying resilient and being a good business partner. – Samantha Williams, Sonoko
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3. Remove excess as much as possible
Executives should practice good cybersecurity hygiene and lead by example. Try to eliminate redundancy as much as possible by thinking long-term and looking for more global enterprise solutions. Many problems can be solved with the same product. – Ainsley MacLean, Mid-Atlantic Permanente Medical Group I Kaiser Permanente Mid-Atlantic States
4. Embrace flexibility and agility
Considering how companies have overcome the unprecedented challenges presented by the pandemic, “resilience” has taken on a whole new meaning. It is necessary to embrace flexibility and agility throughout the entire IT and development lifecycle infrastructure. Experimenting with platforms and enablers, achieving scale and efficiency in phases versus “big bang” migration, and focusing on change management are some of the adaptations that have emerged. – Ruble Joseph, eClerk
5. Establish risk oversight for supply chain and digital transformation threats
Building IT resilience from a cybersecurity perspective requires technology leaders to go beyond the general framework to not only identify, protect, detect, respond and recover, but also to provide risk oversight in terms of new threats in the supply chain and digital transformation pipeline. It is also important to prioritize building a capable and inspired team – people, not technology, are at the heart of resilience. – Staveley Trust, Cybersafe Foundation
6. Learn to spot points of failure
Resilience breaks down at individual points of failure. Learn to spot them and remove them. This used to mean dealing with organizational redundancies, costs and slow processes, but today the cloud offers many elegant ways to create this resilience. – Vincent Berk, Quantum Exchange
7. Designate a person who will be in charge of reliability
It must be a priority for an organization to have at least one person overseeing reliability. Depending on the size and needs of the organization, this may be outsourced to the site reliability team. At Apprentice, our software is a critical system for our customers, so we have a dedicated team focused on system reliability, preventative maintenance and operations improvement. – Angelo Straquatanio, apprentice
8. Ensure sufficient allocation of resources
IT and cyber security must be the core priorities of any organization, not an afterthought. To demonstrate this commitment, leaders must allocate sufficient resources to build resilience and enable continuous improvement. Further, strict processes and rigorous training are required, from solid onboarding for everyone to failover and disaster recovery planning, staging and fire drills. – Hamid Farooqui, Sogolitics
9. Bring in the best possible support team
Hire the best talent and deploy the latest technology to overcome errors in processes, infrastructure or integrations. Partner with subject matter experts based on their core competencies in a specific domain. For example, don’t hire business process transformation experts to modernize your infrastructure, or vice versa. – Jas Bagga, Abusiness LLC
10. Apply the principles of safety by design
Apply security-by-design principles to IT-related projects and ensure effective monitoring mechanisms are in place to track operational and technology disruptions. Further, be sure to have a team on standby to respond to these types of disruptions. – Ronald Martey, GCB Bank PLC
11. Be data driven
Be data protected. Backing up data is not a one-time exercise; it is a continuous exercise. Build a flywheel or virtuous cycle around operational improvement. Invest in the use and monitoring of data and instrumentation. Have a dedicated team — with clear ownership — to manage operations, a big part of which is accurate data collection and reporting. – Puneet Gupta, Amberflo.io, Inc.
12. Perform a risk assessment to build a resilience roadmap
Perform a comprehensive risk assessment and map IT resilience. A detailed risk assessment should cover potential risks related to technology, personnel, processes and the business environment. The resulting roadmap should document mitigation strategies and corrective action plans to promote rapid resolution of any identified risks or issues. – Ashish Kumar, Salesken.ai
13. Consider both short-term risks and long-term disruptions
IT resilience today is threatened by both short-term risks – pandemics, recessions and supply chain issues – and long-term disruptions – hybrid operations, digitalisation and regulatory focus on ESG. Circular technology lifecycle management can help technology leaders achieve IT resilience by proactively addressing all of these obligations while equipping organizations with digital tools for the future. – Carmen Ene, 3stepIT
14. Disruption Plan
Make sure you have a disaster recovery plan in place and test it regularly to make sure it’s effective. Build redundancies into your systems, with multiple backup systems, so you can continue to operate in the event of a failure. Cloud-based services can provide additional resiliency and help you maintain operations in the event of a disaster. – Bhavin Patel, CT Corp
15. Don’t neglect a structured training plan
I believe one area that is often overlooked is a structured top-down team training plan. Sounds simplistic, I know; however, technology advances very quickly and it is so easy to get left behind. While I strongly believe in Gartner’s predictions of hyperautomation (everything that can be automated will be automated), we must develop new skills to maintain resilience. – Alek Cherniak, ZAPTEST
16. Build an agile culture
Build agile systems across your organization. Embracing flexible tools and platforms, as well as Agile methodologies, can help you respond quickly to the changes around you while minimizing their impact on your operations. If you pair that with a mentality of constantly changing and improving the way you do things, you’ll be better equipped to deal with ever-changing situations and emerging problems. – Matthew Sopiars, Code Power
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