The International Organisation for Standardisation defines business continuity as: “the capability of an organisation to continue the delivery of products or services at acceptable predefined levels following a disruption”. Business resilience, on the other hand, it defines as: “the ability of an organisation to absorb and adapt in a changing environment to enable it to deliver objectives and to survive and prosper”.
In a nutshell, the difference between continuity and resilience can be boiled down to merely surviving or thriving when the unexpected occurs.
The 2019 crisis report by PricewaterhouseCooper found that seven out of 10 organisations surveyed had experienced at least one severe crisis in the previous five years. But businesses need to take that extra step, so that when future disruptions and upheavals arise their structures and processes will be so rigorously designed that they will have achieved business resilience. This means they will be much better placed to navigate such increasing problems as cyber attacks, extreme weather events and the impacts of social unrest.
And the first step for IT teams to achieve this is via network resilience.
In Cisco’s 2021 Global Networking Trends Report, the global IT and networking conglomerate identifies five key networking trends that can assist organisations in moving from continuity to practical and robust resilience.
1. Remote workforce security
As remote working continues to rise, IT teams must optimise the cost, security and performance for each staff member, and extend enterprise-class operations and governance from the office to the home. All of this can be challenging, particularly regarding security and end-user behaviour. Tools to mitigate this include:
- scaling VPNs (virtual private networks) to protect remote employees
- using multifactor authentication to protect applications, and
- deploying a secure access services edge (SASE) to offer protection for multi-cloud access.
2. Safe return to workplaces
While practical health and safety measures are top of mind for those organisations welcoming some or all of their workforces back into offices, there are IT considerations that will assist in promoting a business resilient enterprise, with a reported 62 percent deploying more pervasive video conferencing rather than face-to-face meetings and 36 percent focusing on remote NetOps (network operations) and help desks. This has the combined advantage of further ensuring physical distancing, but also assisting the organisation in enacting any DR (disaster recovery) plans it has created. Additional steps to facilitate a safe return to the workplace include:
- stress testing of the network
- automating identity-based secure access, and
- performing location-based analytics, such as monitoring, alerts and insights to protect the health and safety of stakeholders by leveraging existing Wi-Fi networks.
3. Facilitating a multi-cloud environment
The IT equivalent of not putting all your eggs in one basket, a multi-cloud model distributes applications, workloads and data across on-premises data centres and public cloud providers. The result is a reduction in costs, an increase in flexibility and, most importantly from a business resilience perspective, protection against catastrophic failures. A successful multi-cloud network strategy includes:
- workload – simplifying policies, security and management across data centres and various public clouds, and
- access – adopting SD-WAN (software-defined area networks) and SASE approaches gives consistent secure access for users and devices both remotely and on premises.
4. Automation of operations
External challenges have led to greater strain on NetOps teams, not just from the upsurge in remote workers, but also from significant fluctuations in client counts, application traffic patterns and the use of tools and systems such as e-learning, video conferencing and virtual events. Automation of processes is able to facilitate their rapid and continual improvement, and a step-by-step approach is the ideal way to achieve this by automating:
- repetitive administrative tasks
- network access, onboarding and segmentation
- network policy within the enterprise data centre
- cloud policy, and
- end-to-end multi-domain policy-based segmentation.
5. Leverage of AI-powered network analytics
Advanced analytics assist NetOps teams to make prompt, informed and smart remediation decisions. Some of the outcomes AI-enabled networks, combined with machine learning techniques, can achieve include:
- greater detection accuracy
- faster remediation
- automated policy management
- fewer degradations, and
- peer intelligence.
Events such as the 2020 Australian bushfires and ongoing crises such as COVID-19 have shown that business resilience is now a top priority for organisations and one of the most important pathways to achieve it is ensuring network resilience first and foremost.
The Cisco 2021 Global Networking Trends Report can be found at https://www.cisco.com/c/en_au/solutions/enterprise-networks/networking-technology-trends.html
