Why Digital Immune System is Important for Businesses

Businesses face never ending challenges on a daily basis. They constantly work on providing a reliable client experience by formulating optimization strategies and by practicing resilience. A recent study has shown that enterprises that will invest more in the digital immune system will be able to satisfy their customers and might be able to exceed their expectations. Such companies will be able to minimize their downtime to 80% by 2025. Let’s explore how the digital immune system is helping to reduce business related risks. 

What is a Digital Immune System?

A digital immune system is a comprehensive term which involves a set of technologies, practices and software engineering strategies used for software design and development, automation, data analytics and operations in order to minimize business risks. Having an effective digital immune system means that it will act as a barrier against software bugs or other security related flaws. There are many instances when your applications and services fail to function properly which might affect your business performance. DIS allows these applications and services to be robust, resilient and competent enough to recover from such faults and failures by mitigating business risks. 

Prerequisites for Digital Immune System

There are six prerequisites for an efficient and powerful Digital Immune System as discussed below:

1. Chaos Engineering: In order to identify the faults, weaknesses or vulnerabilities in the complex system, it is essential for businesses to do experimental testing beforehand. This means that the teams can practice and test run safely without any obstructions in a pre-production process. Later, they can implement the lessons that they learnt in the normal operations and proceed towards the right course of action by engaging in the process of production hardening.

2. Observability: The element of observability enhances transparency and allows systems or software to be "seen" or "observed". The data that the system generates helps IT teams to monitor the application performance. This helps them to identify the root cause of the problem and address it. Users’ experience also improves as their behavior is monitored. 

3. AI augmented Testing: This means software testing will be done by businesses without much dependency on humans or requiring their intervention. It automates the planning, creation, maintenance, and analysis of tests, complementing and extending conventional test automation.

4. Auto remediation: This practice involves building context-sensitive monitoring capabilities and automated remediation functions into an application. This enables an application to monitor itself and correct issues automatically, returning to a normal working state without requiring the involvement of operations staff.

5. Site reliability engineering: SRE is a way of managing digital services that focuses on improving the user experience and customer retention. It uses a set of engineering practices and principles to balance the need for speed and innovation against stability and risk. By doing so, it frees up developers to focus on creating a great user experience.

6. Software supply chain security: This is essential to protect against attacks that can happen when software is being created and distributed. One way to improve security is to create a "bill of materials" that lists all the components used in the software, whether they are open-source or proprietary. This makes it easier to track and manage potential vulnerabilities. By implementing strong version-control policies, using trusted artifact repositories, and managing vendor risk, you can help protect the integrity of your code.

 In conclusion, every company should have a Digital Immune System to deal with the growing challenges and risks. This will protect your business from vulnerabilities and attacks.