Racing Towards IT Resiliency: How to Navigate Planned and Unplanned Changes

Written by: Greg Lotko

If you really think about it, the best way to handle an issue is to prevent it from occurring to begin with. However, when things do go wrong, the next step is to minimize overall business impact, and accelerate time to recovery and resolution. That’s where IT resiliency planning comes in.

Effective resiliency plans are multifaceted and focus on multiple areas across the enterprise–from workforce resiliency, to operations, to security, and more. However, there are three key strategies that are particularly important for boosting overall IT resiliency:

1. Proactive problem identification
2. Automation
3. Planned and unplanned change management

Predicting Challenges with Proactive Problem Identification

Key to resiliency planning is planning for the road ahead–including what could go wrong and issues that may occur so as to proactively prepare to navigate those challenges. 

If you think about racing, for example, an F1 team studies the track and weather patterns ahead of a race, and plans out a tire management strategy in relation to those external factors in an effort to maximize success. The same rings true in IT resiliency planning–whether it’s developing code, implementing security protocols, or training a resilient workforce to avoid challenges before they occur. These are all components of a proactive problem identification strategy–helping enterprises anticipate issues earlier and quickly remediate them when they arise.

Optimizing Efficiency with Automation

Creating a resilient enterprise must include preventative measures to keep business-critical services up and running. That’s where carefully-planned automation comes in.

To return to the racing analogy, F1 teams use automation and simulation while looking at historical data to run through and model different scenarios in order to help drivers optimize their performance on the track. Translating this to IT, enterprises are closely looking at their environments and leveraging automation across processes and transactions to optimize performance and efficiency–effectively reducing business disruption.

Planned and Unplanned Change Management

Interruptions and changes can be both planned and unplanned. In F1, for example, there’s at least one planned pit stop in each race. However, external factors (including the temperature, distance, weather, etc.) can change how often a driver needs to pit–and the team is prepared to navigate all of these potential scenarios. 

In technology, enterprises similarly work to plan out planned changes while minimizing impact from unplanned ones. Change management is an effective way to go about this, as it standardizes methods and procedures to ensure efficient handling of required changes across the enterprise.

What’s Next in Your Resiliency Journey?

To advance and gain a competitive edge in the technology space, you must have a proper IT resiliency plan in place. This means leveraging what’s available in the tooling space, choosing a partner in the ecosystem to help you plan, and keeping your resiliency roadmap up-to-date so it can evolve alongside your organization.

Learn more about resiliency planning.