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Preparing for disruptions to enterprise application ecosystems
From undersea cable sabotage to AI deepfakes and restrictive regulations, modern applications face a barrage of threats. Organisations must prioritise resilience by diversifying infrastructure, investing in cyber security, and embracing sustainable practices to ensure business continuity
In our globalised world, every disruption – human-made or natural – impacts both the provision, support and consumption of goods and services. Enterprise applications are no exception.
As organisations depend on increasingly complex application ecosystems, resilience must be built into applications to ensure business continuity. This can be done by adapting and preparing applications for emerging disruptions.
It’s important to consider a wide variety of disruptions beyond just technology-led ones, which are often complex, have multidimensional impact and demand a holistic response.
Internet at risk
With almost all global data running through a few hundred undersea cables, natural disasters pose a significant risk to global internet infrastructure, particularly cyclones, submarine landslides, underwater volcanic eruptions and earthquakes. So too do irrational human activities like undersea cable sabotage. Entire regions could experience internet blackouts or become isolated as a result.
Cable breaks and sabotages can be mitigated through increased physical security, satellite internet and global cooperation. But the damage caused to the internet’s credibility through deepfakes and failure of key internet-based services could erode the trust in shared infrastructure and lead to internet fragmentation. Investment in cyber security technologies to guard against deepfakes and their integration into existing application ecosystems must be a top priority for organisations.
Furthermore, current IT infrastructure is highly interconnected, making it even more fragile. The July 2024 CrowdStrike outage demonstrated that the entire ecosystem must offer the highest levels of service delivery assurance to maintain the public’s trust in the system.
Organisations without adequate application redundancies and protections will struggle to recover in case of failures. To counter that, Gartner predicts 70% of companies will adopt regionally diversified supply chain models to improve network resiliency in the face of ongoing global disruptions by 2028.
Strangulation by regulation
Restrictive government regulations, often with a local regional focus, are disrupting the operations of multinational organisations. This includes technology vendors that depend on the free flow of data, technology and talent across borders. This will negatively impact their competitiveness and ability to provide a full suite of applications.
There has also been a steady uptick in government regulations related to technology development, use, transfer and sale. However, measures around data localisation have become more stringent and common. This has been driven by increased mistrust of other countries, motivations of major technology providers and growing concern about the unintended impacts of emerging technologies on society and the planet.
In response, multinational organisations could opt for a federated structure that necessitates a revision of global enterprise application strategies and a reassessment of global application delivery to more localised models.
Organisations can also address nationalisation risks by developing policies that require third-party vendors to adhere to their privacy, localisation policies and regulations.
Serious sustainability
The recent global focus on inflation and economic headwinds has meant that very little concrete action has been taken to support sustainability. However, two key trends will force organisations to take sustainability seriously.
The first is transformation activities that fundamentally change IT’s energy footprint, such as the adoption of technologies like artificial intelligence (AI). Any organisation leveraging AI will have to do a lot more than they are currently doing to offset the environmental impact and meet their sustainability targets.
The second is organisations now being indirectly accountable for the emissions through their vendors when they adopt more of an “as-a-service” model to consume their IT software and services. Gartner research shows a “say-do” gap when managing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from vendors, where there is a disparity between what organisations state they will do and what they actually end up doing.
This shift to a consumption-based model means that IT departments cannot estimate their carbon footprint, making it difficult for organisations to achieve their sustainability goals – especially related to GHG emissions.
Increasingly, organisations will need to undertake additional due diligence within the application decision-making and sourcing process to align with business cost, performance and environmental objectives. That includes making environmental, social and governance (ESG) efforts either mandatory criteria or increasing its weighting as they evaluate vendors, as well as scrutinising their ongoing performance on sustainability targets.
As a whole, organisations need to engage and incentivise vendors to commit to agreed environmental sustainability targets and key performance indicators (KPIs), then manage advancement towards targets by setting milestones that enable continuous progress.
Neha Ralhan is a senior principal analyst at Gartner, focused on enterprise application, enterprise resource planning and customer experience strategies
