In an era where digital transformation is at the heart of every thriving business, ensuring robustness and reliability of digital infrastructure is paramount. This narrative changes dramatically when systems fail, leading to loss of revenue, reputation, and customer satisfaction and trust.
Have you seen these kinds of projects:
- During development and showcases, everything is fine. Your new production environment works fine with the prototype users. You are processing millions of messages. Then you have to do a massive update on your IoT devices. Suddenly your system stops responding, you are getting errors, messages got lost. In post-mortem analysis, you find that messages were missing before, but nobody detected it. Specifying and implementing proper load test scenarios could have prevented this.
- Developers are in a hurry, a pressing performance issue needs to be fixed. It seems to be a small change, test cases look fine. But when deploying, suddenly the production system crashed. Fixes introduced a memory leak. Using methods like pair programming, code reviews, or dynamic code scanning could have prevented this.
Recently I stumbled upon an article about Digital Immune Systems (DIS), a holistic approach to prevent these failures before they start. Gartner defines a DIS as a combination of “practices and technologies for software design, development, automation, operations, and analytics to create a superior user experience and reduce system failures that impact business performance”. This approach encompasses various phases of the software lifecycle to ensure that digital services remain resilient, secure, and user-centric.
Let’s take a short, deeper look into the software lifecycle and see how a digital immune system can help you. Starting with your software design: How often have you seen that the user does not get what he needs regarding functionality, performance, or usability? As part of the DIS process, you can implement early user feedback loops in the design process to identify potential UX issues. You can also try to forecast user behavior using predictive analytics so that your system can adapt to the next most likely step.
During your software development, a lot can go wrong when developers and architects are in a hurry. Have you seen untested code go into production, crashing systems, or causing unwanted behavior? It worked fine with 2 test users. A DIS during software development ensures the application of proven patterns to create resilience and robust software, introducing CI/CD pipelines for ensuring quality, consistency, and reproducibility. Add merge and code reviews or pair programming.
An automated End 2 End testing approach, additional to conventional testing, ensures that most common use cases (at least the 80-90% cases) work whenever you deploy. A DIS introduces chaos testing into your process, which randomly tries to introduce unexpected cases and helps in creating more robust software.
A DIS uses automation to leverage your quality by introducing automation into your processes. Whenever possible, automation is used for code scanning to reduce technical debt, automatically test your software, and report failed tests. You can use Infrastructure as Code (IaC) to automate the provisioning and management of infrastructure, ensuring consistency and reducing manual errors.
When you finally have your software production-ready and deployed and are operating it, a DIS will help you keep an eye on your digital services. It will keep them running by implementing a real-time monitoring and analytics system to detect and address anomalies quickly. Automated incident response systems can help you reduce downtime and outages.
Great analytics can help you understand your user better. What does the user do, where does the user fail? Also, using AI-driven analytics can provide you with more insights and even prevent system failures and initiate preemptive maintenance.
A DIS also implements built-in cybersecurity into your digital services by running automated vulnerability scans also on your operating software. Conducting regular security audits and penetration testing can help you identify and rectify vulnerabilities.
Conclusion
Incorporating a Digital Immune System into your digital strategy is not just about preventing failures; it’s about creating an environment where continuous improvement, resilience, and customer satisfaction are integral to the technology lifecycle. By adopting DIS practices, businesses can not only safeguard against potential disruptions but also pave the way for innovation and growth in the digital age.