Improving Business Resilience In Challenging Times: Top Five Technologies To Invest In

Managing Director at a1qa, a pure-play QA and software testing company.

Covid-19 turned out to be one of the most significant challenges the global economy has experienced recently. No wonder many businesses were unprepared for the effects of the pandemic, especially those from real estate, logistics and other industries.

The prolonged crisis marked the importance of business resilience management for mitigating risks threatening organizations. The ability to withstand them while maintaining core business workflows and employees' health became the focal point of a survival strategy for companies.

How do organizations reach this complex objective? In addition to creating a solid business continuity plan, organizations can benefit from modern technologies to boost productivity, support decision-making and increase overall security. In this article, I'll focus on them in more detail.

Why continuously work on business resilience?

Unfortunately, global pandemics aren't the only triggers for business disruption. Natural disasters, power outages and cybersecurity attacks can all affect a company's operation and require a quick and confident response — which, by the way, should be looked at differently in each case.

Organizations that pay insufficient attention to this matter most often face the following negative consequences:

• Tarnished reputation. The way a company responds to any disruptions impacts the clients' perception first and foremost. Whatever the accident is, they expect you to act swiftly. Otherwise, your inability to tackle challenges will be a matter of public record.

• Financial stress. The downtime duration directly affects the losses. Without a well-built business continuity policy, disruption costs will only increase.

• Business failures. The worst scenario. We faced 200,000 closures in the U.S. alone during 2020. These numbers are devastating. Thus, we see that thriving in the face of disturbances is unlikely without a strategic approach to ensuring business resilience.

Invest, implement, profit.

It seems pretty simple — until you ask yourself: "What should I invest in?" With the number of technologies tech-savvy C-level executives use, it's easy to get confused. However, if companies strive to undergo digital transformation and stay resilient to disruptions, they may consider the following steps.

1. Introduce robotic process automation (RPA).

Automation is the key to surviving during an uncertain time, which is relevant for businesses across diverse industries.

For instance, today companies leverage RPA opportunities to increase productivity, efficiency and accuracy. Retailers automatically update inventories and product information, manufacturing companies ensure the automation of logistics data, organizations from the BFSI field automate customer account management, and healthcare institutions automatically perform patient data migration, to name a few.

By green-lighting its implementation, organizations can execute tedious processes, perform time-sensitive work to meet set deadlines and remove pressure from staff.

2. Take care of cybersecurity.

With working from home becoming the "new normal," the number of cyberattacks performed by malicious intruders has increased pro rata.

As businesses face security risks and data leakages, key points remain for companies to focus on protecting cloud infrastructure. Putting privacy-by-design and data segmentation policies first remains equally important. By keeping control over the team members able to access sensitive information, organizations can lower the chances of data exposure and reputational damage.

3. Consider AI to leap ahead.

Risk assessment processes are connected hand in hand with data gathering, management and analysis. Here's where AI steps in.

While used to support big data analysis, it generates real-time scenarios to spot and evaluate risks more accurately and in a noticeably short time. By determining vulnerabilities in the organizational infrastructure and simulating the worst-case outcome, AI helps to design more thoughtful disaster recovery plans.

4. Benefit from IoT, IoB and AIoT to adapt to a changed context.

Sometimes, it may be impossible to establish remote working due to operational restrictions such as in warehouses. In this case, how can organizations ensure safe working conditions and guarantee social distancing?

Due to high scalability and usage wherever remote work isn't available, IoT and IoB have become a silver bullet for safeguarding operations and keeping business running despite any uncertainty.

For instance, a company may install thermal imaging cameras at the entrances connected to IoT-based solutions that can help briskly adapt in a crisis and allow reopening logistics hubs in the shortest time possible. What's more, by connecting IoT digital systems with AI — in other words, implementing AIoT technologies — organizations may automate production processes while controlling them with minimized human presence.

Going beyond the opportunities that IoT-based solutions provide, why not apply a combination of technologies, data analytics and behavioral science — the Internet of Behavior? By collecting data not only from connected devices but also from information about users' online actions, one gets much more insight into their behavior patterns. This can help address instability issues while predicting people's decisions and timely adjusting business to them.

5. Initiate a shift to the cloud.

As people continue to observe restrictions, cloud technology becomes a beacon of light, allowing employees and customers to access the relevant company data from their homes.

Apart from reduced costs, high availability due to a decentralized infrastructure and increased efficiency, a cloud computing stack contributes to business resilience and helps organizations adapt to a changed context.

With high resiliency to potential outages, cloud provides timely and error-free data recovery, decreases downtime, diminishes the impact of DoS attacks and much more — thus helping companies prevent losses in productivity and revenue.

Now, throughout edge computing and, let's say, gRPC, it's much easier to connect services across various programming languages in on-prem or cloud environments, helping cut costs for software development and maintenance.

Those who are resilient will determine the future.

Although Covid-19 has hit the global economy hard, it has also provided an opportunity to transform and get better. Adaptability and flexibility have come to the forefront for any organization striving to navigate the uncharted waters in the years ahead.

To do so, companies can give preference to technological upgrades. RPA, cloud, AI, IoT/IoB/AIoT and a strengthened approach to maintaining security may ensure high business resilience, eliminate production downtime and improve organizational performance.

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