How IT Tech Strengthens Business Resilience

Businesses have to be resilient if they are to survive. They must be able to adapt to disruptions and maintain continuity of operations in order to prevent loss in revenue and keep customers happy. Since virtually every business uses one form of technology or the other, IT  is vital to building and maintaining an organization’s resilience.  In order to support a business in this manner, IT needs to be resilient as well.

Technology resilience

Businesses can be disrupted by a multitude of factors. Common problems like network unreliability, power outages, or equipment failure can hinder day-to-day operations. Grave scenarios like natural calamities, terrorist attacks, cyber-attacks, or a global pandemic like the current Coronavirus outbreak may cause severe enough problems to halt operations completely. A company’s technology resilience is its capacity to maintain a certain level of service quality despite the disruptions to business operations while providing solutions.

For IT infrastructure to strengthen business resilience, an organization can consider three things.

1. Firstly, it needs to ensure the availability and operation of business-critical IT components. For example, it has to guarantee that employees have access to their personal computers, laptops, and other IT equipment necessary in order to perform their duties amidst events that can cause business disruptions. Another example is making sure that the company’s websites, e-commerce or otherwise, remain up and running so customers can avail of the company’s services.
2. Secondly, technology resilience has to ensure that business-critical data is accessible and secure. Business and customer data should be backed up consistently and recovered reliably. Access to the data by employees or customers should also not be disrupted. Having multiple copies of business data that is updated regularly is a good idea. Furthermore, situating the data center in a separate location is advisable as well. There should also be robust systems to secure data from malicious attacks. This can be done by ensuring that the company applies industry-best practices when devising and implementing its IT policy.
3. Lastly, always look to the future when maintaining and improving IT infrastructure. Aside from being resilient against disruptions to business operations, a business must also be resilient to being disrupted by new technologies or trends. For example, in the early 2000s, most websites were viewed via a browser on a PC or laptop. That all changed when smartphones disrupted the status quo, starting with the first iPhone in 2007. The disruption was so massive that in 2015, Google changed its search ranking algorithm to take mobile-friendliness into consideration. Businesses, big and small, rushed to update their websites to be mobile-friendly in order to retain or even increase their search ranking. By 2018,  according to data analyst Dorian Banutoiu, out of the one million websites his company Canonicalized tested, 76.12 percent passed Google’s mobile-friendly test. It was a transformation that had to be done.

Case study:  Gamestop

We can look at the company Gamestop as a case of technology strengthening business resilience. Gamestop is a gaming merchandise retailer mostly known for selling physical copies of video game software. A few years ago, sales of physical copies of video games were already on a downward trend, affecting Gamestop negatively. Sony, Microsoft, and Nintendo had their own digital stores selling games as digital downloads. In 2018, Statista says that 83 percent of all video games were being sold digitally. To make matters worse,  a few years later, the coronavirus outbreak forced Gamestop to close all 3,526 of their stores across the United States. 

Fortunately for Gamestop, however, they had the infrastructure in place to sell their merchandise online via their website and mobile app. Although the company reported a net loss of $165.7 million for the first quarter of 2020, the decline was arrested. E-commerce sales increased 519% for the first quarter thanks to their new online shopping model. The losses would have been worse had they not been able to make the pivot. 

Things are looking a bit better for the company. By the end of May 2020, Gamestop has been able to slowly reopen its US stores to limited customer access. It is also expected to benefit from the new consoles that will be released by Microsoft and Sony in time for the 2020 holidays. There is still a demand, though, for physical copies of video game software. A 2018 survey by US Games reports that 66 percent of console players would rather buy physical copies of games. Regardless of how the customers swing, one important lesson remains:  Gamestop was able to leverage its IT infrastructure to ensure business resilience amid the global pandemic.

The bottomline 

Making Information technology systems resilient, and consequently strengthening business resilience, requires investment in good IT infrastructure as well as competent forward-thinking people to manage the IT resources. The current COVID-19 pandemic has caused massive disruptions to how businesses operate. The repercussions and effects of these disruptions will be felt for a long time. Companies should consider investing in maintaining and improving their IT systems to continue business operations during these troubled times. They should also be on the lookout for technology trends and new upcoming IT solutions that they can incorporate into their infrastructure to further improve technology resilience. In this way, they safeguard their future.