Strengthening Operational Resilience: A Crucial Goal for Surviving the Next Threat

It’s an interesting moment in time, to say the least. Across industries, every company is looking inward at their own operations to determine how they can weather this period in history. At the same time, they’re looking outward at how they can support their customers in doing the same.

The reality is that in a changed world, we all have to look at our businesses differently. That’s why so many organizational leaders are rethinking their priorities to focus on what’s critical to maintaining both short- and long-term relevance: accelerating digital transformation, enabling work-from-anywhere models, and strengthening operational resilience.

If you try to run your business with its pre-pandemic focus and cadence, you’ll miss big. At best, the results will be off the mark and at worst, they’ll prove disastrous for your company, your customers and your employees. This is the time to be incredibly proactive in analyzing and addressing the operational challenges that are unique to your business in a pandemic landscape.

But it’s not solely about weathering this particular storm. According to global consulting firm PwC, the definition of operational resilience is “an organization’s ability to protect and sustain the core business services that are key for its clients, both during business as usual and when experiencing operational stress or disruption.” So it’s clear that business and IT leaders need to look with a long eye to a horizon that may have other pandemic-level disruptions and ask, “Do we have what it takes to survive the next big hit?”

This is about seizing the opportunity now to build operational resilience in real time to address this current crisis—and then evolve that resilience to keep your organization strong and flexible enough to absorb external shocks and keep on going.

At Riverbed, we’ve seen the interest in operational resiliency firsthand. As companies went from workforces tightly clustered in physical offices to a far-flung, work-from-anywhere model, the sudden hit to IT visibility into application and network performance was unnerving and unproductive. How were critical apps and systems running? Could employees connect with business-critical apps when and where they needed them? How were these applications performing across the network? Could there be a better experience? Could IT departments understand security threats to the network—or network performance at all, especially with the workforce going remote?

We’re fortunate that our innovations help customers stay ready and able to deliver their own innovative products and services. When you’re trying to keep things moving in a crisis, it’s important that employees are able to work efficiently using applications in complex hybrid environments. For example, that’s where our ability to deliver ten times the acceleration for SaaS applications is essential.

Our real-time visibility tools make it possible to understand network and application performance and resource utilization across these complex hybrid cloud environments. The way we manage network performance blends telemetry from every packet, flow, and device in context with the machine learning, AI-powered analytics and visualization to ensure action can be taken. This is the way IT teams can get to the bottom of issues faster, detect security threats before they become catastrophes, and automate remediation.

Moving forward, operational resilience will increasingly become a differentiator for companies large and small. Customers want reassurance that when disaster strikes, the companies they choose to engage with can still deliver on their commitments—from delivering products that inspire to helping them troubleshoot and solve problems to developing new services that address emergent needs.

If the pandemic has taught us anything, it’s that operational resiliency is paramount. And, this was certainly validated at the Riverbed Global User Conference, where more than 1,000 attendees gathered virtually to discuss every angle of operational resilience and more. If you were unable to attend the event, we’ve compiled more than 30 sessions and keynote replays from our conference to give you the essential capabilities and how-to advice needed to maximize performance and visibility of any network for any application to all users, anywhere. Register to access the full library of content, here.