Infrastructure resiliency can lead to positive business outcomes, but to achieve digital infrastructure resiliency, organizations need to prioritize gains in five key attributes:
- Digital infrastructure contributions to business outcomes
- Resiliency readiness
- Consistent and prescriptive governance
- Improving autonomous operations and prioritizing automation
- Ubiquitous deployment of cloud-native platforms and services
IDC says the level of maturity an organization has reached with regard to infrastructure resiliency can be based on its standing across each of these attributes, all of which are measurable. The firm has defined four levels of maturity: leader, pacesetter, progressive, and latecomer, and determined what traits an organization needs to demonstrate for each level.
For example, with business outcomes, a digital infrastructure leader will have made investments in infrastructure that are consistently aligned to business success. With resiliency readiness, leaders will have made business continuity a priority, with the infrastructure designed to withstand all kinds of business disruptions.
In the areas of governance and compliance, a leader always makes workload and data governance and protection a high priority requirement driving deployment choices. With autonomous operations and automation, a leader makes it a priority to deploy technologies such as artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) to derive insights that proactively drive continuous, automated optimization. Automation in operations is a priority.
Finally, with cloud-native platforms and services, a resiliency leader makes extensive use of containerization in application deployment, paired with real-time optimization.
At the other end of the maturity spectrum are digital infrastructure latecomers, which are lacking in many of these traits. For instance, with business outcomes, a latecomer presents digital infrastructure limitations that are often associated with curtailing growth and innovation.
Latecomers don’t fare much better with resiliency readiness, with limited or no defined plans or playbooks for recovering from unexpected conditions. There is little readiness for recovery from such events.
With governance and compliance, latecomers place little importance on data compliance requirements. Workload and data protection and compliance requirements have a limited impact on their deployment choices, putting these organizations at greater risk of data breaches, fines/penalties, and other negative impacts.
In the area of autonomous operations and automation, latecomers have mostly ad-hoc processes, with organizational silos that are not governed by central IT. And in the area of cloud-native platforms and services, latecomers primarily rely on traditional bare-metal and virtual machines (VMs).
Organizations that would be designated as pacesetters and progressives fall somewhere between these two groups. But it's clear that there is a significant difference between leaders and latecomers in terms of digital resiliency maturity and how it drives the ability to achieve business outcomes.
An organization that finds itself in the latecomer category should strongly consider taking steps to move up the maturity ladder to become a digital infrastructure leader.
