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Gartner has estimated that by 2025, organizations that have invested in building digital immunity will have increased their average customer satisfaction and decreased their downtime by 80%. But what is a Digital Immune System, and why are we talking about taking care of it?
According to Gartner, a Digital Immune System (DIS) combines practices and technologies from all walks of the technosphere to create a superior user experience and reduce the likelihood of system failures that impact business performance. Essentially mitigating operational and security risks in real-time.
Practices from software design, development, automation and analytics are mixed to protect applications and services and make them more resilient against failure.
Cloud data security experts say we should start with a strong vision statement when building digital immunity. The message should hold value for the business and its IT stakeholders while aligning with the organization’s objectives. It should also take into account the following six practices and technologies.
Observability
Software and systems need to be seen by the team to provide information on current and pending issues. You can also improve user experience (UX) by observing user behaviour and common problems.
AI Augmented Testing
Testing software using AI augmentation can make these activities independent of human intervention. Implement it alongside traditional testing methods, and you’ll find it complements them, providing you with fully-automated planning, creation, maintenance, and analysis of tests.
Chaos Engineering
Use experimental testing in chaos engineering to uncover vulnerabilities and weaknesses within an otherwise too-complicated system. Ideally used in pre-production environments to allow teams to master the practice in a safe and non-intrusive manner, the idea is to push the system to its limits to learn more about its resilience requirements.
Auto remediation
Auto remediation is particularly useful to test through your chaos engineering! Auto remediation focuses on building monitoring capabilities based on your application and applying remedial action directly to the program when needed. The monitoring and corrections are all automated, keeping a normal working state without your team’s intervention.
Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)
SRE is a set of principles and practices used in engineering designed to improve customer experience and retention. These principles and procedures reduce the effort of the development teams on remediation and tech debt, allowing them to focus on creating a compelling UX.
Software Supply Chain Security
Taking control of your software supply chain by creating trusted repositories for software downloads and opening up the supply chain processes will help you address the risks of software supply chain attacks. Define the software asset lifecycle and protect the integrity of internal and external code.
Combining these practices and technologies in this way or implementing them in new areas of the business while focusing on optimizing your customer experience and mitigating risk will ensure your digital systems remain functional, even in the event of a compromise.
Implementing a digital immunity strategy requires an innovative mindset, and all key stakeholders must buy into the system throughout the process.