How To Build Resilient IT Operations in 4 Steps
If the past few months have taught us anything, it’s that managing digital incidents has become a part of IT’s daily routine. Research shows that 84% of businesses have experienced an increase in outages in the past two years. The rise in digital incidents serves as a stark reminder that resilience in IT operations is no longer optional. It’s business-critical.
Building Resilience Is No Easy Task
What is operational resilience?
Put simply, it’s the ability to predict, withstand, recover from or adapt to IT outages. It’s the difference between a business flourishing or faltering in the face of a disruption. However, achieving resilience can be challenging.
Modern IT infrastructures are becoming increasingly distributed and complex, spanning a variety of environments such as hybrid cloud, microservices and third-party integrations. While this variety of infrastructure has created a number of innovation opportunities, it also adds layers of unpredictability. One single issue can cascade into any number of different systems and business malfunctions, which can lead to extended service disruption. The resulting ripple effect makes it extremely difficult for organizations to maintain stability, often forcing IT teams into a reactive stance.
Operational resilience is one of the smartest investments an organization can make. It’s a process that requires building the proper foundation.
Here are four simple steps organizations can take toward building operational resilience.
1. Assess Current Operations
Begin by looking at where your organization stands today. Too often, organizations are weighed down by outdated systems and manual processes that sap resources and hide weaknesses.
Start by asking these key questions:
- Where are the inefficiencies?
- Which processes are error-prone and intensive?
- Are teams being overwhelmed with alert noise?
By answering these, operations teams will be in a better position to recognize where to streamline processes and prioritize the right actions. For example, if teams are constantly being overwhelmed with alerts, it might be time to look at ways to ensure only high-priority alerts that require human intervention are flagged.
While this phase isn’t glamorous, it helps lay the proper foundation for resilience by giving operational IT teams a blueprint for where they can make improvements and assess how resilient their systems actually are.
2. Automate Repetitive Tasks
The next step is to say goodbye to the manual processes identified at step one by identifying where automation and AI can be implemented to make these workflows more efficient.
Some great places to start include:
- Grouping alerts by order of importance to make it easier for IT operations team members to respond to high-priority items and not be bothered by constant alerts.
- Automating typical incident response actions, such as running diagnostics.
- Using generative AI (GenAI) in post-incident reviews to summarize actions taken, allowing reviews to focus on learnings that can be implemented for future incidents.
- Deploying AI agents to identify and classify operational issues, surface context such as related or past issues, and guide responders with recommendations to accelerate resolution.
The use of AI and automation to eliminate manual processes will enable IT teams to work smarter and not harder.
The result? Quicker resolutions and better operational resilience.
3. Ensure Seamless Integration
Step three includes ensuring the responsibility of resilience isn’t limited to IT. True resilience requires commitment from the entire organization.
During incidents, IT must communicate with other business functions so every stakeholder has access to the right information at the right time. Integration with platforms such as Zendesk, Salesforce or SAP that handle business functions, such as customer service and sales support, is crucial. For example, customer-facing teams can’t be as effective if they lack the information to provide customers with proper status updates.
Organizations should also champion cross-functional collaboration, which will lead to improved coordination, better collaboration and smoother communication, ultimately allowing organizations to better manage incidents and reduce system downtime.
4. Track Progress and Optimize
It’s important to recognize that resilience isn’t just a one-time task. It’s an ongoing discipline that organizations must track with measurable goals. Otherwise, it’s impossible to tell whether automation initiatives are truly delivering or simply adding more complexity to operations. Clear metrics will give IT a way to measure resilience and the impact of AI and automation investments. With this feedback, leaders will have a way of optimizing over time to ensure resilience is always meeting business needs.
Turning Challenges Into Catalysts for Growth
Resilience is about agility, adaptability and learning. When done correctly, resilience empowers organizations to bounce back from outages, mobilize cross-functional teams and continuously improve. It gives businesses the tools to keep themselves ahead of their rivals and thrive within this digital-first world.
By assessing, automating, integrating and optimizing their IT operations, organizations can quickly transform disruptions into drivers for innovation and growth.
