Building Digital Resilience

By Sanjay Sahay

Resilience came to prominence when the hacks increased. The business being thrown out of gear was the biggest challenge. The CIA Triad of confidentiality, integrity and availability was breaking at its seams. The underlying and essential denominator necessarily had to be resilience now. The business has to run. The basic mantra of business is business continuity and if that is missing, nothing great is left. That hacks will happen is one reality, the other reality which the customer wanted to be comfortable with, was the recovery time. If that were to be large, then how fast the skeletal services can be brought back into operation and how robust would it be.

While resilience was being bandied around as a Cyber Security prerequisite, the world got struck by COVID-19, the biggest change agent at least in the past one century. With touch and movement given a go by, the dream sequence of the IT behemoths unfolded with no marketing and effort from their side. Digital Transformation. The world had to continue to live, work, educate and transact. This was the real resilience of digital technology which helped make pandemic hit life at least liveable. The way it could transform itself to keep the supply lines moving, where nothing else was there, from Amazon delivery to What’sapp to Zoom meetings, the scalability of the platforms and also the improvement in security was worthy of praise.

Unknowingly, the world moved on to the cloud. There was enough on the platter for Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure and Google Cloud. They could not have asked for anything better. On 22 Sept 2020, Microsoft CEO, Satya Nadella spoke on Building Digital Resilience for around one hour. He outlined Digital Resilience as understood and practiced by one of the leading cloud service providers on the planet. Azure as it is known, he says is leading the battle of digital resilience and it has the capability to impact every individual, sector, industry, research areas, humungous operations and complex supply chains. His unfolding vision is really pathbreaking with large parts of it having gone ahead of the take off stage.

Satya Nadella talks about tech intensity, intelligent cloud and intelligent edge as the cornerstones, enabling Azure to cover 360 degrees of our existence. This really sounds like Cloud Nine. Latest technology can be effortlessly integrated into any organisation. The range is breathtaking Azure Stack to Azure Edge zones to Azure IoT. Azure is the world’s computer, he says. SQL data engine is being brought to the edge devices. Azure Orbital in an innovative service. Cloud native apps are being created. Radical changes like Power apps in teams, Azure IoT, AI from Microsoft research, access to GPT-3 and Mixed Reality are all on its way to become a reality for all. Seamless legal proceedings to seamless identity management, AI enabled can happen on Azure. Security, management and compliance are fully doable on the cloud now.

CLOUD HAS TAKEN US TO CLOUD NINE IN THE DEPRESSING PANDEMIC TIMES.

Author is an Ex. IPS (ADGP), Cyber Security & Emerging Technologies Expert Management Guru, Pro Public Speaker & Writer, Bengaluru