Raen Lim, Group Vice President, Asia, Splunk, Raen Lim, Group Vice President, Asia, Splunk
Raen worked for Oracle Corporation before joining Splunk, where she built and expanded the cloud applications division across Singapore and the ASEAN regions. Additionally, Raen worked for Salesforce as a Regional Vice President of Enterprise Sales. Raen enjoys cycling and brisk walking among other sports. In addition to cooking, she likes to read and listen to music.
A mere three months into 2023 and we have already seen multiple disruptions and outages across workplace and lifestyle applications. Despite the world proving to be more resilient in 2023, many organizations face challenges such as service interruptions, including security threats. The turbulence faced by organizations in 2022 prompted us at Splunk to publish a report titled, ‘Digital Resilience Pays Off’, to investigate how organizations are investing in critical digital resilience capabilities and their business impact. It was conducted with over 2,100 security, IT and DevOps leaders at large organizations across six industries in 11 countries, including Singapore, India, Japan and Australia. The report also separates organizations surveyed into four main categories of resilience maturity- Beginning, Developing, Growing and Advanced.
Defining the Characteristics of Advanced Organizations
Advanced organizations show greater capabilities to address disruption challenges. Investing significantly in observability, they typically have great visibility into their network, and are thus more able to predict and prevent incidents using machine learning and auto remediation. Their stronger observability capabilities enable them to drive better business outcomes, including top and bottom line results.
Four Key Advantages that Advanced Organizations Get to Experience
First, Advanced organizations are more likely to minimize downtime costs. With greater ability to mitigate the impact of disruptions and prioritizing their responses to get revenue-generating applications up and running, Advanced organizations incurred significantly less downtime costs annually at $ 62 million – which is a whopping $ 48 million lower than Beginning organizations who have incurred $ 110 million of annual downtime costs.
Second, Advanced organizations are 2.5 times more likely to be prepared for change. Investing in digital resilience capabilities gives organizations a foundation of reliability and security that can tackle challenges such as economic recession and industry disruptions. The report found that over three quarters of Advanced organizations are prepared to adapt to meet the demands of a recession and face disruptions from competitors, while only a third of Beginning organizations can say the same.
Next, Advanced organizations are able to drive effective digital transformation. Organizations must ensure that their digital transformation projects can overcome complex challenges and have a positive and sustained impact. For example, Advanced organizations have reported that 64 percent of their workload runs in the cloud, enabling them to be more efficient. Findings show
that 53 percent of Advanced organizations are more likely to have had successful digital transformation projects over the last two years while only 25 percent of Beginner organizations were able to do the same.
Lastly, organizations with Advanced digital resilience capabilities are more likely to achieve their financial performance goals. When it comes to meeting or exceeding growth goals in the last fiscal year, results found that there is a 17 percent difference between Advanced and Beginning organizations. Publicly traded organizations that participated in the study also reported stock price growth with Advanced organizations reporting an 82 percent increase while Beginning organizations reported 70 percent.
Digital Resilience Maturity Levels Varies Across APAC
It is no surprise that we also see disparate maturity levels of digital resilience across Asia Pacific. Government policies, infrastructure availability and the lack of resources and tech talent to execute digital resilience capabilities are all factors that contributed to the region’s varying levels of digital resilience maturity.
According to the report, organizations in Singapore experienced the lowest amount of unplanned downtime, clocking only 188 hours while organizations in India experienced the highest amount of unplanned downtime, reporting 342 hours versus 238 hours on average across all other countries surveyed. Despite this result, interestingly, organizations from India were also the most likely to feel fully prepared to adapt to disruption from a recession or from competitors as compared to all other countries.
Diving deeper, we found a larger number of Beginning organizations in the region compared to Advanced organizations. One reason, we see, could be due to the greater proportion of organizations in APAC operating on traditional business models and legacy infrastructure that make it difficult to pivot. Another key consideration would be the lack of resources. Even if organizations recognise the benefits of digital resilience, they are unable to make the necessary investments required for long term resiliency and success. The region is also challenged with closing the knowledge gap to stay competitive, in terms of hiring tech-savvy talents or training existing staff.
How Centralization Can Help Boost Efficiency and Innovation
One APAC company that has seen great returns on investment from achieving digital resilience is The Bank of East Asia Limited (BEA), a leading Hong Kong-based financial services group. Operating in a distributed environment, BEA had a lack of network visibility and relied on manual troubleshooting which was time-consuming since each global team had to run its own SIEM. Now, as a first adopter of standardized cloud security information and event management (SIEM) in the local banking industry, BEA has an internationally centralized SIEM.
Staying Resilient As Disruption Becomes the New Normal
Ultimately, the key to enterprise resilience is resilient digital systems. Resilient organizations are able to prevent, recover, survive and thrive amidst disruption and quickly, repeatedly adapt to new operating models, thus allowing them to stay ahead when threats and disruptions continue to grow more sophisticated. Improving cross-functional crisis management, leveraging on machine-learning and auto remediation and empowering security and IT functions to collaborate are just some drivers that can improve resiliency.
As per research findings, there is a direct correlation between business resilience and achieving financial performance goals with digital resilience. By unifying security, IT and DevOps as the foundation of digital resilience capabilities, organizations can expect various return on investments that will help their business thrive and give them a competitive advantage in the long run.
Lastly, organizations with Advanced digital resilience capabilities are more likely to achieve their financial performance goals. When it comes to meeting or exceeding growth goals in the last fiscal year, results found that there is a 17 percent difference between Advanced and Beginning organizations. Publicly traded organizations that participated in the study also reported stock price growth with Advanced organizations reporting an 82 percent increase while Beginning organizations reported 70 percent.
Digital Resilience Maturity Levels Varies Across APAC
It is no surprise that we also see disparate maturity levels of digital resilience across Asia Pacific. Government policies, infrastructure availability and the lack of resources and tech talent to execute digital resilience capabilities are all factors that contributed to the region’s varying levels of digital resilience maturity.
According to the report, organizations in Singapore experienced the lowest amount of unplanned downtime, clocking only 188 hours while organizations in India experienced the highest amount of unplanned downtime, reporting 342 hours versus 238 hours on average across all other countries surveyed. Despite this result, interestingly, organizations from India were also the most likely to feel fully prepared to adapt to disruption from a recession or from competitors as compared to all other countries.
Diving deeper, we found a larger number of Beginning organizations in the region compared to Advanced organizations. One reason, we see, could be due to the greater proportion of organizations in APAC operating on traditional business models and legacy infrastructure that make it difficult to pivot. Another key consideration would be the lack of resources. Even if organizations recognise the benefits of digital resilience, they are unable to make the necessary investments required for long term resiliency and success. The region is also challenged with closing the knowledge gap to stay competitive, in terms of hiring tech-savvy talents or training existing staff.
How Centralization Can Help Boost Efficiency and Innovation
One APAC company that has seen great returns on investment from achieving digital resilience is The Bank of East Asia Limited (BEA), a leading Hong Kong-based financial services group. Operating in a distributed environment, BEA had a lack of network visibility and relied on manual troubleshooting which was time-consuming since each global team had to run its own SIEM. Now, as a first adopter of standardized cloud security information and event management (SIEM) in the local banking industry, BEA has an internationally centralized SIEM.
Staying Resilient As Disruption Becomes the New Normal
Ultimately, the key to enterprise resilience is resilient digital systems. Resilient organizations are able to prevent, recover, survive and thrive amidst disruption and quickly, repeatedly adapt to new operating models, thus allowing them to stay ahead when threats and disruptions continue to grow more sophisticated. Improving cross-functional crisis management, leveraging on machine-learning and auto remediation and empowering security and IT functions to collaborate are just some drivers that can improve resiliency.
As per research findings, there is a direct correlation between business resilience and achieving financial performance goals with digital resilience. By unifying security, IT and DevOps as the foundation of digital resilience capabilities, organizations can expect various return on investments that will help their business thrive and give them a competitive advantage in the long run.