4 practical ways to make critical infrastructure resilient and efficient

Articolo 10 mag 2024 Tempo per leggere: 1 min

By Michelle Weston, Vice President of Security and Resiliency at Kyndryl, and Cyrus Niltchian, Director of Security and Resiliency at Kyndryl

With cyber incidents on the rise, businesses must protect their data and minimize disruptions. They must also respond to increasing regulations, including those related to sustainability, as they look to improve energy efficiency. However, in both instances, businesses want to minimize costs and maximize their return on investments.

Modern, cyber-resilient, energy-efficient infrastructure can help businesses balance these priorities.

Addressing cyber resiliency and energy efficiency are complementary aims, as businesses invest in IT estates that meet their needs today and in the future. Prioritizing both areas can position businesses to rapidly bounce back from disruptions, increase business value and break down organizational silos.

To bolster their cyber resilience, enterprises must also adopt new cyber-management tools and technologies to drive digital transformation efforts. However, organizations must identify strategies to measure and reduce environmental impact to keep costs and emissions from increasing as these changes are implemented.

Here are four steps organizations can take to make their critical infrastructure cyber resilient and energy efficient.

1. Assess cyber resilient infrastructure

A recent Kyndryl survey found that 92% of organizations experienced an adverse event that compromised or disrupted their IT systems, data or both in the past two years. It’s not a matter of if an organization will encounter this challenge, but when. It’s critical for organizations to continually assess and re-evaluate their IT infrastructure to protect against cyber incidents, including environmental disruptions. Outdated infrastructure not only puts enterprises at risk, but can result in increased emissions, costs and inefficiencies. By implementing cyber resilient infrastructure, organizations can better protect critical data and systems while achieving regulatory and business goals.

2. Measure energy usage

Assessing and disclosing an organization’s carbon footprint can be a complex task but without visibility into their IT estates, businesses can fail to comply with regulatory standards and miss out on the ability to identify opportunities to optimize energy use and reduce emissions. To improve their overall critical infrastructure, it is recommended that organizations implement a centralized data platform to accurately measure their energy usage and emissions. This approach can consolidate data from distributed workloads to measure emissions across hybrid and multicloud environments, enabling organizations to capture a holistic picture of their sustainability data.

3. Analyze sustainability data

Today’s CIOs and IT leaders can use real-time sustainability dashboards to inform actionable insights that help scale their digital initiatives to drive business value. Further, AI-powered data analysis can be used to identify ways to optimize resources and reduce emissions. By analyzing environmental data, businesses can take steps to avoid unnecessary emissions, costs and inefficiencies — all factors that slow innovation.

4. Implement long-term governance models and goals

Creating a more efficient IT landscape is not a one-time event. Organizations should consider implementing a governance process to consistently review their cyber-resilient infrastructure. This requires designated roles and responsibilities from all lines of business to evaluate the efficacy of cyber-resilient capabilities and energy efficiency, which can drive organizations toward new solutions.

Building a cyber-resilient and more efficient IT infrastructure is not only a necessity but an opportunity for organizations to differentiate themselves, achieve their business goals and fulfill their sustainability commitments.

Learn more about how Kyndryl is enabling cyber-resilient and energy-efficient operations through Kyndryl Bridge.

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