Are you enjoying the novelty of virtual conferences in 2020?
It’s certainly true that there are a handful of perks, like no travel, no jet lag, no dreaded lanyards, and no questionable conference coffee (or long queues for said coffee). That said, I think everyone can agree that no matter how excellent a virtual event of any kind is, it’s not the same. There’s no face to face, no buzz, no happy hour, no ability to chat with like-minded people more casually, or be in a different place, focusing solely on the event you’re at - rather than attempting to ‘be an attendee’ and field work requests at the same time.
As with many things this year, we just have to work with the cards we’re dealt and appreciate the positives that come out of it. One of ours was the ability to still bring top industry experts together for dynamic discussions at the DRJ Fall 2020 conference at the start of this month.
We hosted a panel discussion called ‘Maintaining Operational Resilience at pace’ at DRJ, featuring top resilience experts Mark Heywood and Mike Butler, Rick Cudworth, Crisis and Resilience Partner at Deloitte, and Marcus Wildsmith, CPO at Cutover.
Mark, Rick, Mike, and Marcus kicked off the panel session by acknowledging the incredible amount of change in the resilience space over recent years, that there is plenty of good work that has been done, and also a good deal more still to do. They covered topics like regulation, resilience ‘by design’, and the pillars which hold up best-in-class resilience. The session ended with each participant talking through their predictions for resilience in the next 12 months. You can watch the full session recording here. Or, you can read the key discussion points and takeaways from this session in full here.
Here’s a teaser extract of what you can expect:
If you're not resilient by design, you won’t be resilient in adversity
A key point that returned throughout the discussion was the importance of being resilient by design. Having a resilience culture woven into the way that your business operates is absolutely key because everything falls out from that. The conversation continued to discuss whether challenger or start-up organizations had an easier time when it came to resilience because they’re tackling less legacy buildup. While this is true sometimes, it’s not always the case. If these organizations are leveraging the cloud, and (as is good practice for cloud native) building their platform to fail, and most importantly maintaining this approach, then they should continue to be resilient by design. However the cloud is not the ‘silver bullet’ it is made out to be, and the reality is that often these companies get distracted budget-wise by new enhancements rather than maintaining/updating these crucial services. If this happens, startups can find themselves in a legacy situation pretty quickly.
The key idea is that to be resilient - you have to do it by design, but it cannot be static, you need to ensure and enhance it through change. Change needs to be reframed from being a risk to resilience, or a key cause of disruption, to an opportunity for adaptation and the expansion of capabilities.
Cutover can enable you to enhance your IT resiliency and recoverability postures, deliver consistently exceptional customer experiences and make space for innovation and growth by minimizing manual interventions and elevating human and machine collaboration. See for yourself by scheduling a tailored demo of the platform.