Why an IT resilient strategy needs to be in the modern CIO’s toolkit
According to an IDC Worldwide IT Industry 2018 Predictions — Australia Implications report, digital transformation is core to the business strategy of 71 per cent of Australian organisations.
Of the 100 Australian organisations surveyed, 4 per cent say they are already experiencing aggressive transformation resulting in greater market share and profit margins.
The rest indicated that digital transformation initiatives will help them to compete differently or to maintain their market relevance in the next 12 to 24 months.
For a CIO, the ability to be IT resilient while rolling out a digital transformation project is fundamental. Mitigating the risks of downtime and ensuring an 'always-on' business whilst delivering the best customer experience, is key to a successful digital transformation rollout.
What is IT resilience?
A digital transformation project is multifaceted and coupled with an increased need for data security and protection, can be complicated to roll out.
Having an IT resilience strategy in place allows an organisation to smoothly adjust to change while protecting its business and customers from disruptions. The CIO has to have robust IT systems in place that can allow the organisation to recover quickly without compromising any interruption to services.
With the digital economy moving at an unprecedented rate coupled with high instances of outages stemming from ransomware attacks to human error and natural disasters, downtime is inevitable. It's no longer a matter of if it will happen but when.
What should an IT resilience strategy entail?
An IT resilience strategy should cover three elements – continuous availability, workload mobility and multi-cloud agility. This is to ensure that the organisation can withstand any type of disruption, leverage new technology seamlessly and move forward with confidence.
1. Continuous availability
Delivering an 'always-on' customer experience is essential to keeping the customer experience high. Continuous availability is the approach to an IT system that protects users against downtime so that customers remain connected to their documents, data, and business applications.
Essentially, continuous availability means that whatever bump you might hit, be it a cyber-attack or a flood, both you and your customers are completely protected against disruption.
2. Workload mobility
Having workload mobility allows organisations to move application and data workloads with ease, all while being completely protected is vital. This can cover anything from migrations to consolidations and provides the CIO with a high level of business confidence.
Although workload mobility is not a new concept, the idea has been brought to the front and centre for many organisations due to the rapid adoption of the public cloud. With the multitude of cloud service providers on the market, it's more important than ever that IT teams have workload mobility in order to unlock their on-premises environments and extend their data centers to the cloud.
3. Multi-cloud agility
As cloud technologies evolve, a multi-cloud strategy is the best fit that enables CIOs to leverage the cloud to help accelerate their business, properly taking advantage of what the cloud offers. The benefits of this include having the freedom to choose their own cloud and equip them with the ability to move to, from, and even between clouds that have vendor lock-in.
Adopting a multi-cloud strategy gives organisations the ability to cherry-pick the best levels of performance, response time and throughput for each.
All three of these elements working concurrently ensure you can withstand any disruption and leverage any new technology seamlessly. Combining this with the likes of analytics, control, and a unified platform for leveraging new technologies pushes innovation and business efficiency. For CIOs, this means becoming completely IT resilient and will give you greater confidence in being able to drive forward on your road to business transformation.
