Six prerequisites for a strong digital immune system

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:

(a) Observability enables software and systems to be “seen.” Building observability into applications provides the necessary information to mitigate issues with reliability and resilience and — by observing user behavior — improve UX.

(b) AI-augmented testing enables organizations to make software testing activities increasingly independent from human intervention. It complements and extends conventional test automation and includes fully automated planning, creation, maintenance and analysis of tests. 

(c) Chaos engineering uses experimental testing to uncover vulnerabilities and weaknesses within a complex system. If used in preproduction environments, teams can safely master the practice in a nonintrusive and test-first manner — and then apply the lessons learned to normal operations and production hardening.

(d) Autoremediation focuses on building context-sensitive monitoring capabilities and automated remediation functions directly into an application. It monitors itself and corrects issues automatically when it detects them and returns to a normal working state without requiring the involvement of operations staff. It can also prevent issues by using observability in combination with chaos engineering to remediate a failing UX.

(e) Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a set of engineering principles and practices that focuses on improving CX and retention by leveraging service-level objectives to govern service management. It balances the need for velocity against stability and risk, and reduces the effort of development teams on remediation and tech debt, but allows for more focus on creating a compelling UX.

(f) Software supply chain security addresses the risk of software supply chain attacks. Software bills of materials improve the visibility, transparency, security and integrity of proprietary and open-source code in software supply chains. Strong version-control policies, the use of artifact repositories for trusted content and managing vendor risk throughout the delivery life cycle protect the integrity of internal and external code.