Building Resiliency for Holiday 2021
The next few years will find retailers across the country focusing on significant business model innovations by harnessing technological intellectual property to build resilient digital supply chains that ensure the delivery of high customer experiences at scale.
The retail, distribution, travel, and transportation sectors have very significant seasonal peaks during the holidays in which operational disruptions equals lost revenue, sometimes with disastrous consequences.
Technology and business leaders will be challenged to demonstrate greater agility and continuity in a market that will continue to be volatile and unpredictable.
Between supply chain disruptions, an unprecedented uptick in ransomware attacks, and the challenges associated with modernizing enterprise operations by supporting hybrid, multi-cloud infrastructures, CIOs, CISOs, and line of business executives will have their hands full.
The next few years will find retailers across the country focusing on significant business model innovations by harnessing technological intellectual property to build resilient digital supply chains that ensure the delivery of high customer experiences at scale. Technology and business leaders will be challenged to demonstrate greater agility and continuity in a market that will continue to be volatile and unpredictable. So say Scott Ernst and Kayla Broussard, executives with IBM’s cloud advisory and cloud architect practices, in a podcast interview with BizTechReports.
“The retail, distribution, travel, and transportation sectors have very significant seasonal peaks during the holidays in which operational disruptions equals lost revenue, sometimes with disastrous consequences,” said Broussard.
Kayla Broussard, IBM
Resiliency is all about practical engineering based on anticipating a broad range of scenarios that allow organizations to recover when incidents occur. It is a state of readiness that has become increasingly difficult to achieve because of the complex multi-cloud environments most organizations now operate. It is, however, a rising imperative for executives who must navigate an increasingly severe threat landscape.
“Ransomware attacks, for instance, seem to be in the news every day. That said, expectations for Holiday 2021, however, are high. The National Retail Federation (NRF) is projecting 2021 to be up significantly -- not only over 2020 but -- but also over the much healthier 2019 holiday season,” said Ernst.
This means that the industry will have to aggressively pursue its topline growth and market share expansion strategies while simultaneously defending its digital flanks
Teamwork Makes the Dream Work
Scott Ernst, IBM
Resiliency, it turns out, is a team sport. Just as no man is an island -- in the immortal words of John Donne -- supply chain integrity cannot be maintained without a significant amount of ecosystem cooperation. Digital diplomacy throughout the value chain will be needed to manage risks and mitigate the effects of disruptions that can come in all forms.
“That is why the concept of resilience operates on a higher plane than conventional notions of cybersecurity, disaster recovery, and business continuity. As a result, organizations are prioritizing the different threats that they see out there and are not just looking at issues from their own operational or technology environments. They're looking back into a supply chain because supply chain impacts could turn their entire business upside down,” explains Ernst.
Even though an individual organization may be buttoned up, making it through Holiday 2021 will require a consistent and reliable channel of distribution.
“Today’s concepts around cyber incident recovery are quite different from the traditional backup protocols. It is essential for organizations to integrate air gap protection into their systems and leverage immutable storage on the backend to protect critical data and application assets from today’s threats. It is also important to ensure that critical trading partners are doing the same thing,” said Broussard.
“Initiatives should put validation protocols and technologies in place to ensure that data that backed-up data is clean, protected, and recoverable. This will require organizations to explore the role that concepts like ‘network isolation’ will play in their enterprise infrastructures,” she concluded.
For more information on BizTechReport podcast interviews, please contact Melissa Fisher at MFisher@BizTechReports.com.