Why resilience drives the business case for emerging tech investments

Industry analysts Gartner recently released their emerging technology roadmap for large enterprises. For the last few years, it’s been a predictable picture, with the need for 'increased speed and agility’ consistently topping the charts in terms of driving emerging technology investments and deployments. But things have changed. The need for ‘enhanced resilience’ now tops the charts.

Resilience is the ability to bounce back, while preparing to get better in any endeavour. It’s not a reset.

- Gartner, Top Strategic Predictions of 2022 and Beyond.

The future is hybrid

Covid has accelerated the digital journeys of many large enterprises with cloud leading the charge. This shift is creating highly complex hybrid infrastructures, as for the majority of large enterprises, legacy isn’t going away any time soon. Evidencing this, a Gartner survey of large enterprise cloud migration plans shows that organizations will continue to have an average of 60% of their critical application workloads outside of the cloud till 2023. This, combined with the application landscape explosion, means that technology environments will keep getting more and more complex.

Managing workloads across complex heterogeneous hybrid environments is really hard. It has never been more difficult for technology leaders to see what hybrid digital infrastructure they have and ensure it delivers value. Complexity breeds vulnerability, and in complex environments the probability is that something somewhere is most likely failing at any given time. The truth is a production environment is a complex system that is unpredictable and in a perpetual state of failure. And downtime is expensive…  and with IDC estimating the average cost per hour of infrastructure downtime is $100K per hour, it puts a lot of pressure on businesses to keep that downtime to a minimum.

Complexity puts resilience top of the agenda

‘Resilience’ is now top of the agenda; with Gartner noting that the requirement for resilience now drives the business case now for the majority of (in fact 64%) of emerging technology investments this year.

“Digital Platform Conductor tool” is the term Gartner is using to describe the rise of tools that enable technology leaders to strategically manage across their infrastructure, regardless of environment or location. The good thing about these tools is that they work with the technologies large enterprises already have, can meet them at their current level of maturity, and are flexible enough to adapt as they improve and as their needs change.

Complex hybrid organisations need to create a foundation that can withstand shocks and respond to operational needs at speed. It needs to embrace complexity, value continuous improvement, whilst accepting that failures are inevitable. This realistic view of the landscape is called continuous resilience - when inevitable failures occur, don’t just hit reset. 

Continuous resilience

Organisations need to be engaged in a continuous process of identifying weaknesses, protecting against them, responding to incidents and adapting from them and using the recovery process to learn. And they need tools to support them throughout this. Digital Platform Conductors, like Cloudsoft AMP, can:

• Sense a failure occurring and automate recovery, reducing unplanned downtime and its costs, by 99%
• Use blueprints to model applications any environment, and set policies to manage their behaviour during incidents.
• Automation full application lifecycle management and codify skills and knowledge, reducing effort by 75% and guarding against skills attrition.

Visit our Resilience Resource Centre to learn more.