Best Practices
• 6 min read
Digital Resilience for Modern IT Teams
4th July, 2022
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Digital resilience, traditionally concerned with the notion of cybersecurity and online literacy, now embraces the different ways businesses use digital tools and processes to quickly recover from or respond to disruptions.
Today, digital resilience entails more than just the ability to manage the risk that comes with disruptions. It now entails being more prepared than competitors to deal with disruptions and even profit from them.
As we progress toward a digitally dependent future, the demand for Digital Resilience is increasing rapidly.
Digital Resilience supports businesses by providing a number of solutions to help them recover fast from disasters or disruptions utilizing digital technologies and processes.
Factors such as volatile market conditions, legacy technology, and security threats like ransomware can all cause disruptions.
Resilient organizations use the latest tech-driven, end-to-end strategies to respond quickly to disruptive events while keeping a strong focus on staying competitive. It develops procedures to deal with and recover from disruptions.
Early adopters of digital technologies are better positioned to respond effectively to crises like the one we have all encountered during the times of Covid-19.
As the rate and frequency of disruption remain uncertain, digital technologies become essential to business continuity and their resilience to unexpected extreme events.
We've spent the last two years preparing for a remote, hybrid workforce, driving digital transformation, leveraging automation and artificial intelligence, and adopting SaaS to build a resilient organization.
CIOs and IT leaders face a variety of challenges as they continue on the path to ensure the long-term sustainability of their organizations and their workforce with increased SaaS adoption.
Businesses will need to improve their agility and adaptability to deal with these new challenges. To reach this goal, building a digitally resilient business model that supports the ongoing shift is important.
Building a digitally resilient business model requires:
Developing a greater ability to respond quickly and effectively to market changes.
Transforming the way a company manages data and digital governance in the face of disruptive events.
Improved interactions between companies and their stakeholders (including customers, employees, and partners).
Automated data privacy compliance and zero trust access to enhance security.
Increasing the speed at which new technological developments can reach the marketplace.
How to Attain Digital Resilience
Integrate Security Measures Into Each and Every Process and Application
For a quick reaction to disruptions, you should incorporate security breach prevention and recovery by implementing digital governance across the enterprise.
Employees use unmanaged devices to access company resources from a range of locations when they are working remotely. Perimeter-based security is out of consideration when it comes to securing cloud environments. If you don't use modern security measures, hackers can gain access to any software application, database, server, and device.
Security measures ensure every user and transaction must be validated before access to an enterprise resource is granted.
Businesses should incorporate strong cybersecurity measures into the core of their IT systems. You should devise an efficient cyber resilience plan to reduce the impact of an attack on your digital assets while keeping your organization running smoothly.
This can be achieved by implementing policies and tools:
Integrating security in the IT infrastructure
Strong password policy
Data Loss Prevention policies and tools
Integration of security solutions like CASB, SASE, and SSE
Setting up Identity and Access Management system and controlling excessive privileges by integrating PAM tools and Zero Trust Models.
Securing mobile and endpoint devices
Enhance PII Security and Integrated Compliance
Resilient enterprises are shifting towards a holistic view of the network and security. They prefer an approach that considers not just network performance but also where the vulnerabilities lie.
Without data privacy protection, digital resilience is incomplete. Automating compliance with these regulations ensures compliance with data privacy requirements such as GDPR, CCPA, PCI DSS, and HIPAA.
Automating the discovery and masking of PII and sensitive data in all situations encrypts the data so that it cannot be traced back to a person or used for malicious purposes if it is exposed.
Embrace Digital Transformation: Moving from Legacy Based System to the Cloud
Embracing digital transformation means changing outdated hardware, software, and infrastructure. Shifting from legacy-based model to hybrid or multi-cloud environment.
IT assistance is automated and delivered as a service in cloud environments, using the most cutting-edge digital technologies for IT management, security, and operations. When it comes to cybersecurity protection, cloud providers are likewise growing increasingly sophisticated.
The global pandemic has compelled businesses to abandon their legacy systems and adopt cloud computing- SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS.
Given the disruption pandemic has caused, the shift away from outdated software and adoption of the cloud is obvious, especially SaaS. It becomes a necessary step for business continuity in the digital age and a worthwhile investment.
The use of SaaS is rapidly expanding. It is estimated that 70% of the business applications used are SaaS-based. And, by 2025, this figure will rise to 85%.
This is due to companies having realized the complexity of legacy-based softwares. There are support costs, as well as scalability and security risks associated with outdated systems, which limits flexibility and the ability to adapt to change, which are a hindrance to digital resilience.
In the face of the ever-evolving technological landscape, if your business relies on obsolete legacy software, it's time to change that and switch to SaaS.
Putting in Place the Necessary Measures to Ensure a Speedy Recovery Following a Disruption
Organizations need data observability and integrity as part of their digital resilience plans to detect and recover fast from data breaches.
High-value targets for ransomware and cyber attacks are mission-critical applications. Creating an automated cyber resiliency allows for the discovery of data risks earlier. Continuous monitoring and notifications, from cyber and ransomware attacks to unintentional data loss, aid in the prevention of costly data loss and application downtime.
Most organizations take 187 days on average to detect a data breach. With better management/monitoring and more advanced insights into security, this timeframe can be shortened considerably.
Educate your Workforce
Employees can make a big difference in making an organization digitally resilient by doing things like sharing sensitive information securely.
Even if you have all the right policies in place for your business to run smoothly, they may not work well if your employees don't follow safe data sharing and security practices.
You must hold training and drills for your staff once a year to teach them how they can contribute to digital resilience every day and how to respond to incidents, like data breaches, as per documented processes and procedures.
Optimizing your Employee Experience
Companies across the globe are putting money into improving the employee experience to help the productivity and performance of their remote workers.
IT leaders have realized that giving employees more freedom to choose how they work will make their companies digital resilient, and they are investing in technology to improve the experience and productivity of their employees.
Even though many IT leaders around the world have switched to making technology decisions with employees in mind, it is still a challenge to create an environment where IT encourages engagement and productivity.
Using the right tools, policies, and procedures to support a remote workforce in order to accomplish organizational goals is pivotal for achieving digital resilience.
Employee engagement and productivity, retention and onboarding, skill development, and learning all play a crucial role in keeping employees engaged and motivated.
Taking control of the SaaS landscape
The development of SaaS has replaced the conventional IT function of purchasing software. Now, everyone in a company can subscribe to SaaS. A company's SaaS library that is not controlled might lead to SaaS sprawl.
After the pandemic, remote work culture has also significantly contributed to the ongoing SaaS sprawl.
A company with 200 employees uses more than 150 SaaS apps to run its business, but there is no good way to manage how these apps are deployed.
Without managing the company-wide SaaS stack effectively, companies face problems like overspending, shadow IT, underutilization, duplication, compliance, and security issues.
How Zluri Supports Digital Resilience by Helping You Better Manage Your SaaS Landscape
Zluri is an all-in-one platform for IT teams to manage SaaS apps. It helps you find, manage, control SaaS spending, secure, and comply with 3rd party SaaS apps from an intelligent command center. In short, Zluri gives the IT team control over their SaaS landscape. Let’s find out how:
Full SaaS stack observability to Tackle SaaS sprawl
SaaS sprawl is getting out of hand. But, our customers have discovered 200-300 percent more SaaS applications than they expected after deploying Zluri. While some of these applications may not pose a financial danger, they do pose a significant security concern.
The first step in safeguarding your SaaS applications is to discover them.
Discover Shadow IT
Shadow IT is the use of applications without IT approval.
While shadow IT can boost employee productivity and foster creativity, it can also pose severe security concerns to your organization via data leaks, potential compliance violations, and other issues.
Gaining access and control over these applications is a vital step that Zluri assists IT Teams in accomplishing.
Automated and Secure Employee onboarding and offboarding
Zluri enables onboarding and offboarding with a single click. The automation workflow engine enabling onboarding automation provides IT admins with insights regarding the applications, and channels users require access to.
Zluri also guarantees that the user's access to the whole technology stack is terminated during user offboarding. This ensures that the former employee isn't a walking threat.
Vendor and Renewal Management
Zluri eliminates the headaches associated with managing vendors and the renewal management process by taking over those responsibilities.
Improve Employee Satisfaction
Zluri ensures employees always have access to the tools necessary to perform their duties effectively. Through Zluri, employees may submit requests for new tools, and the IT department can promptly respond to those requests. This saves employees from having to wait for several weeks.
Increase Employee Productivity
Zluri assists you in increasing employee productivity. The app usage statistics provide insight into the power users who may be experiencing trouble. Then, you can provide the necessary training for those that require it.
Collaborate with Other Departments
Zluri assists IT teams in collaborating with other departments and transforming IT into a business enabler. Every department can see the information they need in its proper context and act on it. This helps with collaborative tasks like procurement, on/offboarding, etc.
Stay Compliant
Zluri allows you to identify and remove apps that do not adhere to regulatory standards. If you want all of your apps to be SOC 2 compliant, you'll get a notification when an employee signs up for the one that isn't.
Secure Your Organization
You can discover risky apps using Zluri and prevent employees from using them by restricting them immediately from the Zluri dashboard. You will also receive information on the users who visit risky websites. Zluri additionally protects your data by preventing ex-employees from accessing your apps.
Check out the ROI Calculator
Zluri estimates potential savings you could make by discovering redundant apps, unutilized and under-utilized SaaS apps, shadow IT & overpriced vendors, and automating IT tasks.
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