Operations | Monitoring | ITSM | DevOps | Cloud

As cyberattacks become more sophisticated across ever-expanding attack surfaces, it’s easy to assume the security team will take care of risk management and mitigation. Indeed, employees—both within the agency and across the contractor community—are one of the greatest risks to the government’s security postures.

There’s an incident. Your teams need to communicate with the development team that owns the service, but that team is too busy to stop and chat. Meanwhile, you in central IT have business leaders asking for updates, angry internal users calling the help desk, and customer service representatives asking for information. You have hundreds of tickets all pertaining to the incident in your ticketing system.

Government agencies had to adapt to a rapid increase in demand for services in 2020. They also had to adjust to a remote workforce. Many found themselves picking up the pace of their digital transformations and trying to modernize during a global health crisis. Perhaps above all else, many learned the importance of using the right digital tools, platforms, and services. They still have a long way to go.

As a modern enterprise your digital infrastructure – in all likelihood – is a multi-tiered, evolving, and expanding combination of services built on next-gen technologies. This dynamic configuration of servers, networks, applications, routers, etc. provides you with the agility to respond to rapidly changing customer demands. But it also tests the resilience of your digital infrastructure. Each microservice, each integration, each little update can snowball into a major outage.

This thread came in a weird way as a result of seeing yet another re-run of the classic movie “Back to the Future” the other day. Bear with me on this one, and hopefully it will start to make some sense.

Like a football or soccer team, security also has two lineups that must be continuously managed. One lineup involves protecting the digital assets and data of a business. The other: managing the security risk and vulnerability exposure of these environments and endpoints. The tension between these two lineups keep security and IT very busy. There is a critical shortage of expert security professionals, which means no expanding the bench of talent, even if you can afford it.

Business disruption can happen any time, especially when you least expect it. That’s why it’s critical to have a business resilience plan in place. “We define organizational resilience as the ability to maintain performance in the face of environmental, political, social, cyber, and other disruptions,” explains ServiceNow Chief Financial Officer Gina Mastantuono in the Workflow Quarterly Fall 2021 issue.