"Indian enterprises are well ahead of their global counterparts when it comes to resilience capabilities"

In a recent chat with VARINDIA, Jyoti Prakash, Regional Sales Director, India & SAARC Countries, Splunk has discussed cybersecurity resilience, to improve performance, to prepare organizations for major disruptions etc.

Organizations operating efficiently along with digital resilience

Elaborating on the topic Jyoti says, “The pandemic and other major disruptions have changed the reality of how enterprises operate today. Despite these constant changes, customers and consumers continue to expect secure, seamless, always-on digital experiences. Now, more than ever, organisations are required to get their digital ecosystem right in order to stay relevant and competitive. Especially in the context of India, where the availability of 5G promotes innovation and enables new forms of connectivity, it is imperative that organisations develop proactive and competitive digital resilience capabilities. This approach is characterised by advanced capabilities in the areas of - visibility, detection, investigation, response, and collaboration.

In our latest research, we outlined that implementing key drivers such as cross-functional crisis management, automated incident response, and collaboration to support accelerated release cycles enable organisations to kick off their resilience journey. Developing a comprehensive digital resilience strategy across departments will enable them to remain competitive and overcome disruptions. Here, we found out that Indian enterprises are well ahead of their global counterparts when it comes to resilience capabilities - with more than half of them feeling more prepared to cope with disruptions caused by recession or competitors.”  

To reduce downtime, and improve overall performance
Unplanned downtime has varied and wide-reaching implications, with businesses risking both revenue and customer loss. Jyoti further points out, “In fact, per Splunk’s ‘Digital Resilience Pays Off’ research, organisations face an average of $87 million per year in downtime costs due to lost revenue and productivity. Instead, advanced digital resilience capabilities enable organisations to reduce their downtime costs by an average of $48 million per year.”

A core tenet that enables advanced organisations to minimise the impact of outages is their level of visibility across their digital systems and leverage on powerful investigation capabilities. In essence, it is the level of ability to collect and analyse data from various sources in real-time, that enables organisations to make timely, informed decisions based on data insights.

“An important technology trend of recent years has been observability, where organisations monitor their operations in real-time to anticipate issues and maintain smooth operations. In addition, businesses can improve efficiency and performance by continuing to invest in automation, disaster recovery, and employee training to reduce downtime and improve overall performance. Almost all organisations experience outages, system failures, and data breaches. By investing in digital resilience capabilities, they can stay resilient over the long term and continue to perform and innovate securely in the face of disruption,” comments Jyoti.

Barriers preventing organisations to prepare for major disruptions
Focusing on narrow aspects of resilience, such as disaster recovery or business continuity planning, is insufficient and hinders businesses’ ability to deal with major disruptions. Jyoti comments, “Instead, investments should be made in proactive, competitive, and advanced digital resilience technology that detect, prevent, recover from, and respond to incidents that could adversely affect operations and hamper growth. Splunk’s unified security and observability platform gives organisations comprehensive visibility at scale, providing IT, security, and development teams with the right tools to work together to stay secure, be adaptable, and creative.”

Potential sectors for fully automated workflows
Delving deep Jyoti says, “In our global survey of over 2,100 security and IT operations leaders across 11 countries undertaken as part of the ‘Digital Resilience Pays Off’ report, we found that among the key sectors where automation is prevalent are financial services, manufacturing, and technology sector.

With the advent of technology-driven financial services, the banking and financial services (BFSI) industry has experienced a revolution. Cloud technology and flexible IT automation platforms have seen the industry experience rapid improvements in speed, efficiency, and consistency. Data privacy is of paramount concern for businesses in the financial sector and during times of rapid change, they are also more vulnerable. Automation helps them predict and prevent incidents and gives them a foundation of reliability and security, allowing their teams to spend more time innovating and improving on customer experiences instead of troubleshooting and firefighting.”

Message to the CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs
CISOs, CIOs, and CTOs can play a critical role in helping their enterprises navigate the winds of change by investing in these long-term capabilities to be a resilient organisation.

Visibility: Invest in the team’s ability to see across their technology environment, including quality and fidelity of data and completeness of coverage
Detection:  Implement a data-driven approach to identify potential issues, including detection coverage and alerts
Investigation: Encourage the use of data to search for potential issues and accelerate analysis, including enrichment, threat hunting and searching logs, metrics and trace
Response: The speed in responding to day-to-day incidents by security, IT, and DevOps teams
Collaboration: Take proactive measures to break down silos across SecOps, ITOps, and DevOps. By bringing these teams together, organisations can achieve significant business outcomes, particularly during crises, and become stronger and more competitive.