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.
- Business continuity risks including supply chain disruptions, shifts in customer touchpoints, unavailability of critical resources, and gaps in business continuity protocols.
- Surges in transaction volumes (for example, because of a shift from physical to digital purchasing) or precipitous declines in demand.
- Monitoring, reporting, and decision-making with real-time data to respond to immediate business needs in a dynamic environment.
- Workforce productivity challenges due to employees working remotely, associated with connectivity and security.
- Security risks including countering bad actors who will inevitably seek to take advantage of individuals and organizations.
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.
