FEATURE: PROACTIVE SECURITY of shipping and supporting software are no longer fit for purpose. The challenge is to balance speed, stability, and scale, without compromising the reliability customers and regulators expect.
Businesses leaders must see their IT systems and software as central to their success, and this means CIOs must move beyond reactive IT firefighting and take a proactive, strategic approach to software delivery.
The fallout of digital downtime
Recent outages have shown that increasing downtime is not isolated to a single sector. Across industries, UK enterprises face mounting scrutiny over digital reliability. Outside of retail, the banking industry has seen over 800 hours of unplanned outages among major banks alone, which is the equivalent of more than 33 days of unplanned tech and systems outages over the last two years.
While the root causes of these disruptions varied, they all revealed the same uncomfortable truth – the fragility of deeply interconnected IT systems and how quickly they can unravel during a crisis.
As UK enterprises deepen their digital infrastructure, system reliability has become inseparable from brand reputation, and a critical KPI that now defines CIOs’ success. These disruptions don’ t just impact businesses bottom line, they also damage customer trust and business continuity across the sector. When IT systems are so interconnected, even standard software feature rollouts can become risky deployments without the right standards in place.
The hidden cost to tech teams tech teams specifically, the time spent in reactive, crisis mode may also have an impact on rollout of standard features, monitoring and management as usual. Business must have proactive plans in place for tech teams to be able to manage safe feature rollout, and ensure day-to-day activity can continue as usual even during the worst moments.
Here, maintaining resilient systems is not only about keeping systems online, but also protecting the team’ s ability to move forward without sacrificing on quality or security.
CIOs are facing mounting pressure to innovate
At the same time, CIOs today are under more pressure than ever to drive innovation for enterprises. The explosion of AI is forcing CIOs to consider how, and even if they should embed AI into their company models. Many are looking to integrate AI directly into product launches and existing systems. This can increase the surface area for threats, requiring more monitoring tools, and potentially leaving businesses more vulnerable to ransomware attacks. This adds further uncertainty for CIOs, at a time when there is pressure to prove ROI from any AI investment.
Against this backdrop, CIOs must reimagine how software is shipped and supported. Customers are constantly demanding innovation and new features from apps and websites, which can add pressure to IT teams striving to deliver optimal experiences. Daily, regular and ongoing software releases are crucial for everyday updates, through to testing and improving digital products and services. If not prioritised, feature rollouts could well be the cause of a future outage if a deployment goes wrong.
The moment something goes down, engineering and operations teams are thrust into crisis mode. For CIOs, this leads to mounting technical debt and deteriorating morale. Innovation takes a backseat as developers are forced to solve fallout from the disruption.
Tech teams are on the frontline during these moments, and any‘ business as usual’ activity is pushed to the sidelines to jump into what are usually rapidly evolving, reactive situations to mitigate as much damage as possible. As our global systems are increasingly interconnected, tech teams are also more vulnerable.
There are several wider impacts of these more frequent, unpredictable periods of downtime. In the immediate term, customers might be unable to fulfil purchases and orders; and this can lead to knock on damage to businesses’ reputation and bottom line. For
For the teams planning and rolling out software updates, resilience and reliability is key to avoid a business
ULTIMATELY, CIOS MUST PRIORITISE FLEXIBILITY AND SECURITY DURING UNCERTAIN TIMES, AND THIS SHOULD EXTEND TO THEIR FEATURE ROLLOUT
STRATEGIES.
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