By Jyoti Prakash, Regional Sales Director – India & SAARC Countries, Splunk
Geopolitical conflict, sophisticated ransomware attacks, supply chain disruptions, and slackening growth – in 2022, enterprises worldwide had their hands full navigating multiple global headwinds beyond their control.
Businesses globally experienced a transformative year as rapid digitalisation coupled with data storage and migration challenges left them exposed to outages, system disruptions, and security breaches. Splunk’s latest ‘Digital Resilience Pays Off’ report indicates that organisations experience an average of 10 days of unplanned downtime each year, negatively impacting revenue, customer experience, and productivity. However, organisations with advanced digital resilience capabilities save an average of $48 million per year on downtime costs compared to those at the beginning of their journey.
Given the advent of 5G in India, which will promote innovation and enable new forms of connectivity, it is an opportunity for organisations to develop proactive and competitive digital resilience capabilities. In addition to weathering disruptions, they will be able to detect, prevent, recover from, and respond to incidents that may adversely impact operations as well as the ability to continue to develop their business.
In essence, digital resilience in its advanced form involves building capabilities to detect and respond to conditions and stressors that may threaten critical business processes that rely on foundational digital resources. As the definition of resilience expands beyond finding the right talent or having a strong bottom line, CISOs and CTOs alike will also have to evolve in their roles and responsibilities as security becomes a key business differentiation and enterprise resilience includes digital systems.
This is a critical need for companies today as while the pandemic and other major disruptions have fundamentally altered business operations, customers and users continue to expect seamless, secure, and always-on services. Organisations can jumpstart their resilience journey by implementing key drivers that deliver the most benefit: cross-functional crisis management, automated incident response, and collaboration to support accelerated release cycles. Organisations that get digital resilience right can survive and prosper, and Indian enterprises are well ahead of their global counterparts in this regard, with more than half of them feeling more prepared to cope with disruptions resulting from recession or from competitors, as outlined in the report.
Of the over 2100 security, IT, and DevOps leaders from 11 countries surveyed and India ranked among those with advanced digital resilience capabilities. We also learnt that Indian organisations were the most likely to state that most of their workflows were fully automated. These capabilities might be a result of a strong talent pool of engineers and IT professionals who have accumulated significant experience servicing complex global projects.
Advanced organisations have crucial digital resilience capabilities across visibility, detection, investigation, response, and collaboration. Organisations that break down the silos across SecOps, ITOps, and DevOps teams and gather them together, particularly during crisis management are able to achieve key business outcomes. In addition, the use of cutting-edge technologies such as machine learning and auto-remediation help to predict and prevent incidents and ensure cross-functional support, enabling them to accelerate their software release cycle.
In the long term, advanced digital resilience capabilities will help organisations reduce downtime costs, prepare for change, drive more effective digital transformations, and meet or exceed their financial objectives. A foundation of security and reliability also fosters greater innovation and boosts overall business confidence.
As economic pressures intensify, enterprise leaders should consider building advanced digital resilience capabilities not as a cost but as an investment that will yield positive results over time.
