Every cloud has a silver lining, but is it a silver bullet for operational resilience? We hosted an on-demand webinar with Amazon Web Services (AWS) to ask this very question.
The webinar was hosted by former Head of Resilience at USB Mark Heywood alongside Cutover co-founder and CEO Ky Nichol, Rick Cudworth, Partner, Crisis and Resilience at Deloitte and Richard Caven, Financial Services Business Leader at AWS.
During the session, they discussed how, despite solving a number of problems such as reducing risk, moving to the cloud isn’t going to solve all your operational resilience problems overnight. What can make a really significant impact is providing the people involved with a great data set to prevent resilience events going forward.
According to Richard Caven from AWS, operational resilience is not a cloud-specific issue or even a technology-specific issue - operationally resilient organizations are complex and made up of the dynamic interplay between people, processes, technology, facilities, and the information that flows around organizations.
As a result, regulators are adapting their approach with more of a focus on accountability from senior executives and a customer-focused approach, with the cloud simply being a tool to facilitate this.
Richard highlighted four ways in particular that the cloud is helpful in supporting operational resilience:
- Simplification over the complexity of legacy technology and systems
- Transparency, which improves an organization’s ability to respond to failure and disruption.
- Giving organizations the chance to build architecture resilience for compliance and security with their businesses
- The microservices architecture which cloud can be configured into so that it is adaptable
While there were many mentions of the ways in which the cloud is beneficial to operational resilience from a technology perspective, the conversation kept coming back to accountability and the ways in which humans interact with the technology being important. For example, having operational resilience expertise at board level, collaboration with regulators, and providing people with the right data to make good decisions around operational resilience.
Ky noted that being operationally resilient means having robust people, processes and tools. The cloud is a great tool for increasing resilience but the other elements are just as important. It’s also not just legacy technology that can get in the way of resilience, modern solutions also play a big part as increased automation can lead to less oversight and humans still need to be involved for accountability.
To watch the whole conversation and learn more about resilience and the cloud, check out the on-demand webinar.