Achieving business resilience with modern observability, AI, and automation

Organizations need a technology foundation that promotes business resilience, agility, and flexibility. Some technologies are particularly key to support these goals, such as cloud observability, workflow automation, and artificial intelligence.

In the years since the COVID-19 pandemic, organizations have recognized the need to develop greater business resilience.

Companies feel the pressure from myriad macroeconomic factors.

Companies are struggling with rising costs, supply chain imbalances and slowdowns. They have also endured a tidal wave of workforce change wrought by remote work, increasing cyberattacks, and rising geopolitical tensions.

All these factors have increased uncertainty, instability, and rapid change within organizations. Enterprises need greater business resilience to adapt to a dynamic macroenvironment.

Data supports this picture. Organizational disruption is becoming increasingly frequent—and more severe. Indeed, 96% of organizations have experienced business disruption since 2021, according to a PwC survey of more than 1,800 leaders. And 76% of organizations said that the disruption had a medium-to-high impact on operations.

And data center outages are costly.

In the face of this instability and costly disruption, organizations need to develop business resilience to brace for change and remain agile.

“Fostering resilience is not only critical to business performance and transformation, but also ensuring organizations can adapt to virtually any situation,” wrote Vishal Gupta in “Four ways to build a more resilient and future-proof business,” in Fortune.

What is business resilience?

Business resilience is when organizations have systems and processes in place to protect against unforeseen shocks and build organizational agility. In part, business resilience involves an approach to building a technology environment that enables an enterprise to adapt quickly to changing circumstances.

To that end, business resilience requires a strong, secure, and flexible technology foundation to accommodate macroeconomic change.

Certain technologies can support these goals, such as cloud observability, workflow automation, and artificial intelligence. Companies that exploit these technologies can discover risks early, remediate problems, and to innovate and operate more efficiently are likely to achieve  competitive advantage.

Thus, while business resilience is about protecting against unforeseen risk, it also enables an organization to develop a forward-looking strategy that helps it thrive in uncertain times.

“Resilient organizations don’t just bounce back from misfortune or change; they bounce forward,” write Dana Maor, Michael Park, and Brooke Weddle in “Raising the resilience of your organization.” The authors continue, “They absorb the shocks and turn them into opportunities to capture sustainable, inclusive growth.”

To bounce forward, organizations need a strategy to build business resilience. This strategy involves people, process, and technology.

Building business resilience with observability, workflow automation, integrated security, and AI

Technologies such as observability, AI, and workflow automation can boost business resilience by providing insight into complex IT systems in real time. Adopting these capabilities can eliminate manual work and identify cyberthreats that pose risks to data and applications.

Together, these technologies also support business resilience by enabling operational efficiency, cost reduction, and product innovation—all critical business benefits in the wake of abrupt change and disruption.

Modern observability

Observability is the ability to measure a system’s current state based on the data it generates, such as logs, metrics, and traces. When organizations operate in complex cloud environments, they often lack visibility into activity in these environments and how problems arise.

The goal of observability is to provide a comprehensive view of cloud applications, services, and other cloud-based entities so teams can detect and resolve issues. With this kind of comprehensive observability, teams can ensure business resilience with systems that operate efficiently and reliably, and keep customers satisfied.

Workflow automation

Organizations can reduce errors generated by manual workflows and boost team productivity with workflow automation. Manual processes are error-prone given reliance on human input. Manual processes also require substantive effort, which can consume significant staff resources that could be better spent on higher-level, strategic projects.

Workflow automation not only ensures business resilience, it can also help boost productivity and innovative thinking. There are many real-world uses for process automation, including the ability to automatically provision infrastructure—critical for organizations that use cloud architecture—as well as closed-loop remediation capability and the ability to enable teams to collaborate and address problems through targeted notification.

Data indicates that 73% of the leaders in the IT industry attribute some 10% to 50% of time savings by shifting manual tasks to automated ones. and increased efficiency enables teams to become more efficient, strategic, and innovative.

Integrated security and runtime vulnerability management

According to data, 75% of CISOs worry that too many application vulnerabilities leak into applications in production, despite a multi-layered security approach.

A multi-layered approach applies security testing in all stages of development and across devices, applications, networks, and infrastructure.

At the same time, cyber-events such as a zero-day vulnerability can easily penetrate an organization’s defenses. In December 2021, for example, the zero-day vulnerability Log4Shell emerged. It enabled a remote attacker to take control of a device on the internet if the device is running certain versions of Log4j 2.

According to recent data, more than three-quarters (79%) of CISOs say that automatic, continuous runtime vulnerability management integrated with observability is key to filling the gap in the capabilities of existing security solutions. However, just 4% of organizations have real-time visibility into runtime vulnerabilities in containerized production environments.

A platform that can identify vulnerabilities in production and prioritize actions for remediation is thus critical for business resilience as cyberthreats mount and companies risk losing hundreds of thousands of dollars in the days and weeks that follow an attack.

Explainable and transparent AI

As AI models evolve, many organizations are concerned that artificial intelligence algorithms are based on complex, hard-to-understand processes. But for organizations to trust AI-enabled results, the algorithms cannot be based on data that is an impenetrable black box they can’t verify.

Platforms built on “explainable AI” principles not only deliver answers using AI but also enable teams to understand how the platform arrived at those answers, conclusions, and recommendations. Cloud observability that uses fault-tree analysis, for example, can graphically display and map the precise source of error.

As a result, organizations can see exactly how the system arrived at a certain result because the fault tree displays the logic leading to certain conclusions clearly, which boosts business resilience.

“In a world where the speed of response is essential, the organization that uses AI to analyze more information in real time or automate processes to increase its efficiency will be likely to adapt more quickly and thrive,” wrote Mike Etting in the Forbes article “Organizational resilience and operating at the speed of AI.”

Achieving business resilience in times of uncertainty

Ultimately, enterprises are turning to technologies such as modern observability, workflow automation, integrated security, and AI to become more efficient and productive.

Nearly three-fourths (73%) of companies are prioritizing AI over all other digital investments, with the immediate focus on improving operational resilience in an unprecedented environment, according to a study by Accenture.

In the report  “Reinventing enterprise operations,” Accenture determined that 90% of business leaders are applying AI to tackle aspects of operational resilience, which spans data-driven capabilities, such as finance (89%) and supply chain (88%), to experimentation with generative AI.

“All CEOs are under pressure to digitize faster, put more resilience in the business, and find new pathways to growth,” said Yusuf Tayob, group chief executive of Accenture Operations. “The right investments in technology while advancing talent, data and processes is what drives a new performance frontier.”

If your organization is considering modern observability as part of a larger business resilience strategy, start a free trial today.