COVID-19: Systems resilience in times of unprecedented disruption
April 6, 2020
April 6, 2020
In the unfolding COVID-19 crisis, systems resilience is being tested like never before. IT and business leaders must ensure that their organizations can continue to operate through this unprecedented disruption by quickly addressing the stability of critical business processes and underlying systems.
Systems resilience describes a system’s ability to operate during a major disruption or crisis, with minimal impact on critical business and operational processes. This means preventing outages, mitigating their impact, or recovering from them. Our definition of systems includes applications, architecture, data, cloud, infrastructure and network.
The immediate challenge: Operating in a new reality
Companies are operating under a new reality that puts great strain on their systems.
Most companies face a significant gap
Based on our research, most companies are already starting with a significant gap in systems resilience. In 2019, Accenture conducted a vast survey of 8,300 companies that revealed only a small minority have cracked the code on systems resilience.
10%
Only the top 10% of 8,300 companies surveyed have cracked the code on systems resilience.
For the rest, the gap has become more acute. Now is the time to take action to address systems resilience issues today and lay a foundation for the future. The leaders today and those who act quickly to address the immediate challenge will successfully navigate the crisis and emerge stronger.
We’ve outlined clear steps companies can take to bring stability, reliability and resilience to systems, fast.
Mobilise: Within 72 hours
Now: 2 weeks and beyond
Next: An eye on the future
CIOs and IT leaders play a central role in ensuring their organisations can continue to operate through disruption, by taking the following steps in the first 72-hours:
Accenture has identified six resilience building blocks that will enable a quick response to critical systems vulnerabilities.
Quickly enable remote work with a focus on culture, technologies, communications and policies—at extraordinary speed and scale.
Accelerate existing automation investments to mitigate the impact of systems disruption, free up human resource capacity and streamline IT workforce management.
Quickly resolve critical systems availability and performance constraints and scale applications to meet business demand.
Navigate extreme surges or drops in demand, manage risk, deploy instant innovation and optimise cloud costs.
Quickly source and onboard skilled resources to support critical in-flight services or deliver new IT projects.
Secure your customers, people and systems wherever they are to counter the bad actors who seek to take advantage during a crisis.
Even before COVID-19, many organisations faced considerable challenges to their resilience. Once we reach the other side of this pandemic, it will be important to establish long-term strategies for greater resilience. Apply lessons learned from the experience to create a systems and talent roadmap that better prepares your company for future disruptions.
Accenture can help you quickly diagnose critical business processes and systems, identify potential vulnerabilities and take practical and timely action to minimise risk and loss.
As the situation unfolds, we will continuously update our materials, so please check back regularly.
WE ARE HERE TO HELP.