Digital Immune System – Strategic Technology Trends

Digital transformation helps organizations of all types reach their goals. Unfortunately, as IT ecosystems evolve, they face significant security risks that can undermine streamlined workflows, hinder decision-making, and compromise user experience.

Recently, Gartner identified Digital Immune System” (DIS) as one of its top 10 strategic technology trends for 2023.

The digital immune system (DIS) approach includes practices and technologies for software design, development, automation, operation, and analytics. It uses these to create a superior user experience (UX) and reduce system failures that impact business performance.

The research report raises an important question: How can we start using the digital immune system approach to build sustainable technology that optimizes the end-user experience, prevents disruptions, and gives organizations a competitive advantage?

The precise answer depends on many factors, but you can get a general idea from the following elaboration.

Enhance Observability to resolve issues rapidly

The digital immune system approach needs reliable data that helps tools and IT professionals resolve issues before they damage the customer experience. 

We recommend improving the observability of today’s complicated connections between SaaS apps, industry cloud platforms, software supply chains, databases, and user-generated data.

Ideally, improved observability makes it easier to monitor real-time data, helping anticipate potential failures, and enabling proactive measures to prevent them. For instance, latency might indicate more than the slowed efficiency of IT services. With more observable data, we can often prevent or minimize downtime before it significantly disrupts the user’s experience.

Build digital immunity into development processes

Digital immunity and site reliability engineering (SRE) have several things in common. Perhaps most importantly, these two strategies emphasize the importance of resilience and security management at every step of the development process.

Whether building superapps, miniapps, or microservices, we prefer cross-team collaboration that takes the best ideas from everyone involved. At this point, we know that software engineering often works better when programmers, security specialists, analysts, and other tech professionals bring diverse skills to the project.

The same applies to digital immunity systems, especially when you consider the benefits of chaos engineering. When teams build resilient systems, test them vigorously, and learn from threats, technology becomes stronger than ever. 

This process mirrors how the human immune system learns to detect and combat viruses. ultimately becoming better equipped to handle future vulnerabilities that threaten user experiences.

As noted by Gartner:

The fundamental principle of the DIS is to combine complementary approaches that amplify each other to ensure high resilience. Individually, these practices may not suffice to build robust systems, but together they form a powerful strategy for maintaining the functionality of complex digital systems, even in compromised scenarios.

Understand software supply chains & security risks

We often include existing code snippets in our products. If someone has already shared open-source code that performs a task, we don’t waste time and resources duplicating that work. We add the code to our projects and focus on other challenges. While open-source code can help teams succeed, it can also add vulnerabilities to products. The SolarWinds hack stands out as one of the most notorious examples of why companies need to understand software supply chains and security.

The cybersecurity breach caused so much havoc within the U.S. federal government that President Biden issued an executive order that requires a software bill of materials (SBOM) for all software used by government agencies. An SBOM provides a comprehensive list of all components—open-source and proprietary—within a project, along with their dependencies. This is a crucial first step in enhancing software security.

Gartner recommends taking supply chain security even further by writing policies that require version control, artifact repositories for trusted assets, and ongoing oversight that reviews the integrity of all internal and external code. Our experience shows that you can never be too careful when using external code. Always test and retest the code for vulnerabilities. Automated testing with AI tools helps significantly.

Don’t even trust internal code written by your team. It’s far too easy for someone to make a mistake that doesn’t get noticed before a product’s release. Once you give users access to the product, even the smallest threat can turn into a big liability.

Think of understanding software supply chains as akin to nurturing your physical health. Just as a balanced diet strengthens your body's immune system, incorporating "healthy" code into your development projects fortifies your organization’s digital immunity.

Leverage AI and automation

Improved observability and data collection can also contribute to the success of AIOps. Adaptive AI systems can automate critical steps necessary for implementing a digital immune system.

AI models learn from data and emerging trends, enabling AIOps to analyze information in various contexts, streamline event processing, and accelerate incident management. This facilitates continuous improvements that align with evolving technologies.

The coming years will likely include unknown variables that arise from wireless technologies, a metaverse virtual world, and increased reliance on cloud services. We don’t know how those changes will influence existing IT assets. But we don’t necessarily need to. 

With AI guiding some aspects of digital immunity, we can trust that human experts have time to focus on the overall sustainability of the IT organization. We’ll let AI handle obvious threats automatically while people use creative thinking to move ahead of tech trends while maintaining DIS.

Partner with experts to strengthen your DI

Digital immunity might sound like just one of many ways to improve technologies, making them more resilient against intentional attacks and unexpected crises. However, plenty of real-world scenarios already rely on aspects of DIS. Still, moving toward any new concept can feel intimidating.

We’re here to help. Feel free to send us a message. We’d love to talk about practical ways your organization can start moving toward digital immunity that protects you and end users from all threats.