Digital transformation can deliver a number of significant benefits for organizations, including more data-driven business insights to drive new opportunities, increased agility, enhanced customer and employee experience, a more productive workforce, greater collaboration with partners, improved competitiveness and higher profits—to name a few.
Transformation can also come with a host of risks. When so much is riding on the digital infrastructures that power today’s businesses, any number of occurrences can have a significant impact on operations. These include cyber security attacks, power outages, natural disasters and other events.
The results of these types of incidents can include systems downtime, lost business, customer service degradation, lost or stolen data, missed market opportunities, decreased productivity, workplace upheaval, and many other negative repercussions.
An April 2021 report by the Uptime Institute, an advisory organization focused on improving the performance, efficiency, and reliability of business-critical infrastructure, noted that the digital infrastructure sector is struggling to achieve a measurable reduction in outage rates and severity, and the financial consequences and overall disruption from outages are steadily increasing.
The study said one in five organizations in its research had experienced a “serious” or “severe” outage involving significant financial losses, reputational damage or compliance breaches in the past three years, marking a slight upward trend in the prevalence of major outages.
Uptime Institute’s 2022 Data Center Resiliency Survey reported that 80% of data center managers and operators have experienced some type of outage in the past three years, and the proportion of outages costing more than $100,000 has soared in recent years. More than 60% of failures result in at least $100,000 in total losses, up substantially from 39% in 2019. The share of outages that cost upwards of $1 million increased from 11% to 15% over the same period.
Consider how much the COVID-19 pandemic has impacted organizations over the past two years. The pandemic and resulting restrictions forced countless organizations to rapidly shift to a remote work model and put a greater emphasis on e-commerce.
Many organizations are discovering that the key to leadership in the digital age of business is building and maintaining infrastructure resiliency. Deploying digital infrastructure that supports resiliency is in fact a major building block to achieving business success of any kind today.
Organizations that prioritize business resiliency through cloud and digital infrastructure see improvement across many business outcomes, such as increased revenue, faster time to market, improved operational efficiency, and better employee productivity.
An organization that operates a digital infrastructure that is not designed, constructed and maintained with resiliency in mind is setting itself up for failure. Companies that hope to succeed as digital businesses in their markets must be resilient, because their competitors might very well be building resiliency into their own models.
While it’s tempting to focus on the latest innovative, customer-facing applications and jump on the hottest technology trends, the journey to resiliency starts with infrastructure.
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This white paper describes why cloud and digital infrastructure resiliency are so important to success for any digital business, as well as how organizations can conduct an evaluation of their own level of resiliency maturity.
Topics: Cloud, Business Applications
