Why be resilient?
Well, your clients demand it. And it makes business sense; it is much cheaper to retain a client than to acquire new ones. By all means, always expand your client base; just don't make it a zero-sum game by losing clients because you cannot provide decent service.
Although the term has existed since the 17th century, it has only received legal attention since 2020. Now, several years later, the EU and the US require companies to prove their resilience.
To understand what resilience is, please read our article on resilience.
What does it take to become really good at IT resilience?
IT Resilience is a mindset, a collection of techniques, and people management focused on providing consistent service to clients, all rolled into one discipline. While we discuss IT resilience, it takes more than IT staff or IT processes to become a truly resilient business.
Here are 10 themes relevant the (IT) resilient organization:
Transparent culture
A transparent company culture empowers its people to act confidently, respond swiftly to challenges, and continuously learn and improve. This builds a strong foundation for resilience, enabling the organization to navigate disruption or adversity much more easily.
At its core, transparency is about open communication, sharing information, and fostering a culture of honesty and trust. These traits directly influence the various aspects of resilience.
Client service focus
A client service focus isn't just about customer satisfaction; it's an integral part of a company's resilience strategy. Service stability and continuous value delivery are the elements that retain existing clients and attract new ones through reputation. System outages, slowdowns, and errors lead to client frustration and erode confidence. In other words, client service focuses on making sure you are available. Once you have that, then you can look at enhancing and expanding services and products.
Resilient systems and processes often also include tools and capabilities for proactive communication with clients. This can include automated notifications during system maintenance or updates, providing transparency and minimizing inconvenience. A proactive approach to communication creates a sense of partnership, and it demonstrates that you value your clients' time and business.
Adaptability
Adaptable systems and processes give you the flexibility for rapid incident response and easy workarounds, bringing your service back to the level it is supposed to be at.
In the bigger picture, when you design your systems for flexibility and modification, you can rapidly adjust to new market conditions, evolving customer demands, and technological advancements. This agility allows you to pivot swiftly, seizing opportunities while mitigating risks.
In the same vein, adaptable processes, fostered by a culture of continuous improvement and open communication, empower teams to innovate and refine workflows in response to challenges. This constant evolution ensures the company remains competitive and aligned with its ever-changing environment.
Robust change management
When you establish standardized procedures for planning, testing, and implementing changes, IT change management ensures that every modification, no matter how seemingly small, is carefully considered and assessed for its impact on the broader IT ecosystem. This structured approach significantly reduces the risk of unexpected side effects, unforeseen conflicts, and costly downtime, protecting the company's operations and its reputation.
It does not have to be a burdensome bureaucratic process. Modern processes and tools take the sting out of these controls. Many actions within change management can be automated without losing oversight by both the IT custodians and the business process owners.
Redundancy and fault tolerance
By having duplicates of essential components or systems in place, you ensure that even if one part fails, another is ready to take over. This helps you minimize the impact of unexpected events like hardware issues, software glitches, or other unforeseen problems. This might mean replicating critical policy data across multiple servers or data centers in different locations.
Fault tolerance is all about your systems and processes being able to keep working even when facing challenges. By designing your software and systems architecture with fault tolerance in mind, you are sure it can gracefully handle errors and failures, preventing those small problems from causing bigger issues, outages, and unhappy clients.
Security
Clients entrust you with valuable information. Demonstrating a commitment to data security through resilient systems builds trust and provides reassurance that their data is safeguarded against breaches and unauthorized access.
Monitoring and alerting
Trusting that all working is good. making sure is better. When you observe your systems and receive timely notifications when something seems off, you'll be able to address issues before they snowball into real problems.
In any industry, monitoring helps you keep an eye on crucial performance metrics, resource usage, and system health. You'll get insights into how your systems behave, allowing you to identify bottlenecks or potential points of failure before they cause serious problems. And with a well-tuned alerting system, you'll get those critical notifications when something requires immediate attention. This gives you the chance to respond quickly, minimize downtime, and keep things running smoothly for your customers.
Monitoring is also all about business metrics. Keep your service chains running smoothly and understand the ebb and flow of when clients access your services. Then update and enhance in line with what you see happening.
Incident response processes
Well-thought-out plans and processes are key. Work with your incident managers, developers, suppliers, business staff and product owners and build an embedded method for reacting to incidents.
The key is to limit the time of the service interruption. Not everything needs to be handled immediately, so your plan must be clear on how to react to important vs lower-priority incidents. Making the plan and process well-known in the company helps everybody and keeps the calm.
Embedded business continuity
Business continuity planning anticipates and prepares for various scenarios, allowing your company to adapt and maintain essential functions even in the face of unexpected disruptions.
When you proactively address these non-IT aspects of recovery, you build resilience that goes beyond simply restoring technology. It enables you to maintain customer relationships, meet contractual obligations, and safeguard your reputation, even in the face of significant challenges.
Business continuity is not about prevention; it is about knowing what to do when bad things happen that may threaten your company in a more existential way or when you face issues like a power outage in your building, a pandemic, major road works rendering your business unreachable and such events.
Effective disaster recovery
Disaster recovery is your lifeline when the worst happens. Whether it's a major cyberattack, a natural disaster, or a catastrophic hardware failure, a solid disaster recovery plan ensures your business doesn't sink. It's your strategy to get those critical systems back online and your data restored as quickly as possible.
Think of it this way: disaster recovery, just like business continuity, isn't about preventing bad things from happening; it's about being prepared to bounce back when they do. It's like having a spare tire in your car - you hope you never need it, but if you get a flat, you're not stranded. With a well-tested disaster recovery plan, you can minimize downtime, reduce data loss, and keep your operations running even in the face of the unexpected. That translates to happier customers, protected revenue, and a reputation for reliability even amidst chaos.
Conclusion
Resilience is the result of a well-conducted orchestra. Many disciplines come together to help you service your clients in a consistent way.
The operational lifeline of your company and the reason it exists in the first place is to provide your clients with what they need, when they need it, and be able to command a good price for it. And that will keep your shareholders happy as well.