What is the digital immune system and why is it important

What is the digital immune system and why is it important?

Regardless of Investing precious time and money in the development of cybersecurity, threats related to security breaches and data leaks has only intensified for companies. There are always new ways that Cyber criminals use bypass security methods. According to the Check Point 2023 Security Report, cyberattacks increased by 38% in 2022 compared to the previous year, with an average of 1,168 weekly attacks against organizations. And cybercriminals aren’t just targeting corporations, but also financial institutions, healthcare providers, and government agencies.

Companies has to face enormous amounts of cost for finding new and advanced cybersecurity solutions and insurance along with business disruptions, Revenue impact and reputational damage caused by cyber-attacks. This builds huge pressure on IT leaders to build and improve security and data protection using minimum resources. What solutions can IT leaders bring to mitigate the security threats? According to Gartner, the answer to mitigating the impact of cyber threats is “digital immunity.” In this article, we'll discuss Gartner's concept of digital immunity and explore why it's important for software developers.

What exactly is digital immune system?

To understand digital immunity, you first need to understand what a digital immune system is. According to Gartner, "A Digital Immune System (DIS) is a set of technologies and processes that help an organization protect its information and systems from continual attack and exploit." A digital immune system combines a range of practices and technologies from software design, development, automation, operations and analytics to create superior user experience (UX) and reduce system failures that impact business performance. A DIS protects applications and services to make them more resilient so that they recover quickly from failures. During a recent Gartner survey about overcoming the barriers to digital execution, nearly half of respondents (48%) stated that the primary objective of their digital investments is to improve the customer experience (CX). DIS will be critical to ensuring that CX isn’t compromised by defects, system failures or anomalies, such as software bugs or security issues.

Gartner expects that by 2025, organizations that invest in building digital immunity will increase customer satisfaction by decreasing downtime by 80%.

Prerequisites to building strong DIS

When building digital immunity, start with a strong vision statement that helps to align the organization and smooth implementation. Then take account of the following six practices and technologies:

1. Observability:

Observability enables software to be ‘seen’. It allows software to be tracked, monitored, and accessed to detect and resolve issues with resilience and reliability. This helps in enhancing user experience and also to analyze how users interact with the system.

2. Autonomous testing:

AI-based testing and automation allow organizations to conduct software testing independent of human intervention. It comprises fully automated test planning, creation, maintenance, analysis, and execution of test cases.

Integrating Ai technologies with testing complements traditional automated testing processes and extends conventional test automation.

3. Chaos engineering:

Chaos engineering is a practice that uses experimental testing to expose potential vulnerabilities and weaknesses in a system. Various failure tests and chaos experiments are performed on a system to disrupt it and find faults and points of failure.

4. Auto Remediation:

Auto-remediation is a discipline that enables software applications to self-monitor and self-heal. It involves automatically detecting and remediating issues, then returning to the normal state without any human assistance.

5. Application Security:

When operating in a distributed architecture, there’s a high probability of exposing vulnerabilities and threats in the software supply chain. These risks can be mitigated by applying security measures over the software supply chain.

6. Site reliability Engineering:

Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a discipline of engineering practices and principles that leverages service-level objectives as a guide to improve service management. It focuses on creating an engaging UX and retention. This guiding principle helps businesses achieve stability, optimal balance of speed, and a reduced technical debt to allow developers to focus more on building a compelling UX.

Why is DIS essential for software development?

  Slow or poorly developed system will result in compromising user experience(UX) which will in turn lead to customer dissatisfaction  and, in many cases, leading to customers abandoning the system.  A DIS will try to eliminate or at least minimize the frequency of system failures and slowness, which contributes to better overall UX and customer satisfaction, the cornerstones of superior business performance.

We will discuss few a DIS can help achieve these objectives:

• Implementation of DIS is done to minimize the threats to  a business posed when applications are severely compromised. DIS helps in building applications resilience. This helps in minimizing failures , making is less likely for the business to face losses.
• DIS improves the quality of a software by making it more secure, resilient, and reliable, so that it can rapidly recover from failures. It addresses threats and vulnerabilities across the entire software development life cycle.
• DIS provides engineering teams with the necessary insight for addressing threats and vulnerabilities in the form of functional bugs, ransomware attacks, security vulnerabilities, and data inconsistencies. It is done to minimize the likelihood of system failure and reduce any negative impact on business operations.
• DIS brings artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies into the software development life cycle to automate the process of detecting and monitoring security threats. It leverages various technologies and practices, like DevOps, agile methodologies, continuous integration, and delivery.

Conclusion

The importance of a digital immune system lies in the ever-evolving threat landscape of the digital world. Cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated, and new threats emerge regularly. A robust digital immune system helps organizations and individuals safeguard their digital assets, maintain data integrity and confidentiality, and ensure the continuity of their operations. It is a proactive approach to cybersecurity that involves constant monitoring, adaptation, and improvement to stay ahead of emerging threats.

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