Globally, we are witnessing an expanding digital economy that is drawing critical attention from businesses in all sectors. Consumers are increasingly favoring digital-first experiences for almost every need, be it education, entertainment, banking, leisure, shopping, and much more.
Studies by the World Economic Forum point out that digital transformation will enable an additional USD 100 trillion worth of value to the global economy by 2025. On one side, we are seeing the push towards scaling digital experiences across the length and breadth of every business. But on the other hand, there is also a need to ensure that these digital experiences are sustainable in the long run.
For applications to serve increasing customer demands, their digital infrastructure must scale up seamlessly to accommodate the increasing workload. This includes transitioning from on-premises solutions into cloud platforms or building new cloud-native solutions. But moving to the cloud is just one-half of the solution. For businesses to truly achieve digital supremacy, they need to have a digital backbone infrastructure that is secure and resilient. As more customers engage with their digital channels, they need to be always assured of availability and that the data they manage with these digital channels are secured from any threat.
How can the security and resilience of digital infrastructure be guaranteed?
Now that the importance of secure and resilient infrastructure is known, the challenge for enterprise leaders is to ensure both in their digital ecosystem. This is where investing in the right security framework and Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) while formulating your IT strategy can make a crucial impact. Security and resilience need to be ingrained as the two critical pillars of every IT initiative that your business undertakes. By making them an integral part of the IT strategy, it becomes easier to nurture a culture of digital transformation that only allows the creation of secure and reliable digital experiences for customers at every level.
How can security and resilience be achieved?
Enabling secure digital experiences along with SRE is an art that requires dedicated efforts from enterprises. Let’s have a look at how each of the two pillars can be built to guarantee long-term benefits for digital initiatives.
- Security Strategy
When it comes to security aspects, enterprises must make sure that their entire technology landscape adheres to a tailored security framework that defines how every entity behaves within the business’s digital ecosystem. A security framework can be defined to cover protection scope in the following areas broadly:
Perimeter or endpoint: Guarding the outermost IT layer which is often closer to end-user devices or access mediums into the corporate IT network. Ensuring they have adequate firewalls, edge protection security solutions, and anti-intrusion measures in place is the ideal scenario for perimeter protection. Device management solutions and policies can also be a great addition to this security layer.
Network: It is essential to segregate critical applications, resources, and data and place them in access-controlled environments that are isolated from general access provisions. This will greatly reduce security vulnerabilities at a network level.
Application and data: From code reviews to data encryption and data masking, enterprises need to ensure that they build apps with security as an inherent trait and not an external add-on feature. As for data, a proper data governance policy should be implemented to prevent any form of misuse.
Users: Both employees and customers must be educated through awareness programs about the need to comply with best practices in security as they are ultimately the entry point in the corporate network where maximum security attacks occur. They need to stay vigilant and prevent mistakes that can be very costly.
- Resilience Strategy
Enterprises must have an SRE practice that ensures every digital solution is built with a focus on resilience. In the event of an incident, an application should be able to prevent any disruption to end users by adapting to changes needed and recovering its health once the risk is mitigated. This requires focusing on the following areas:
Understanding business impact: Understand which business systems, processes, and people are critical to ensuring continuous business operations. Ensuring that these entities are prioritized for every recovery initiative is a primary responsibility for enterprise leaders. Aligning business continuity plans with IT strategies is also a key component of success in mitigating risky environments.
Simplify communications: There should be a disaster recovery plan where clear communication strategies are defined in the event of an incident. Every stakeholder must adhere to this plan to ensure that negative impact is minimal and transparent auditing and root-cause analysis
Ensure failover support: Be it cloud or on-premises, critical data as well as business applications must be made available from alternate channels when any incident occurs on the primary channel.
Security and SRE will be a game-changer for digital experiences
In an ever-increasing digital business landscape, enterprises must direct a significant part of their IT investments into security and SRE to ensure successful digital experiences at all levels. However, creating a technology roadmap and strategy that prioritizes security and SRE is challenging to achieve with in-house technical prowess. This is where an experienced technology partner like Wissen can be a major asset for your business. Get in touch with us to know more.
