3 Steps to Greater Resilience for Communications and Media

Communications and Media organizations are the backbones of the digital world, providing the infrastructure that powers the services and networks used by organizations and individuals on a daily basis, from the global computer and mobile networks, fiber optics, and satellites to streaming media, gaming, broadcast, and social media platforms. So, to say that uptime is imperative is an understatement. Customers need their systems to work and won’t hesitate to drop their service provider if it doesn’t. 

Communications and Media organizations face an uphill battle to stay reliable and adequately meet customers’ evolving needs. According to Experience Benchmarks, Communication and Media organizations have one of the lowest average NPS scores (31) among industries and an average customer churn rate of 22%. Digital transformation and industry consolidation have created complexity with a sharp rise of interconnected hybrid environments, multiplying potential points of failure and the risk of system outages. And vastly distributed edge networks hold critical services and information farther from the center of the network source, making it harder to recover from inevitable disruptions. 

Also, in light of 5G network rollouts built to support a million connected devices per square kilometer, the resulting expanded networks will also inevitably grow attack surfaces. With significantly more attack vectors, systems and data are increasingly vulnerable to a myriad of sophisticated cyber threats, such as ransomware, bots, and APTs aimed at stealing sensitive information.

Despite, and perhaps because of, these headwinds, Communications and Media organizations need to stay up and running while they also launch innovative services that will attract and retain customers. Boosting digital resilience is their best path to achieving this balance. 

Here are three ways Communication and Media businesses can lay a foundation of digital resiliency that sets them up for future success. 

1. Gain Foundational Visibility to Drive Digital Resilience

Before anything else, digital resilience for Communications and Media organizations starts with complete visibility of your tech stack and processes. Communications and Media organizations have a vast attack surface due to the diversity of their data sources and types. This includes customer data, network traffic data, application data, partner data, and IoT device data. Sensitive, critical, real-time, and personal data are all at risk of cyberattacks.

Because Communications and Media organizations are a complex blend of legacy systems, cloud-native applications, and other interconnected digital systems, teams need a consolidated view of all digital touchpoints that will bring to light key security risks and incidents before they cause significant damage to systems. 

• Security Monitoring goes a long way to address visibility gaps, providing a comprehensive view across the entirety of your complex hybrid environment. 
• Advanced Incident Management can identify and investigate a wide array of incidents, helping organizations gain context about an event quickly and efficiently.
• Proactive Incident Prevention allows teams to detect incidents at the first sign of degradation before they result in a major outage. 

For Splunk telecom customer 2XConnect, for example, it was imperative for the different teams to see into the entirety of the company’s data. Using Splunk Observability Cloud allowed users to work organically and stay agile and secure, while also resulting in 60% less downtime, 100% uptime during AWS migration, and 20% in revenue conversion after a critical bug was discovered. 

2. Be Proactive and Prioritize Actions

Once you’ve achieved comprehensive visibility, you can become more proactive to get ahead of issues before they become catastrophes, which includes taking predictive actions to get ahead of disruptive events such as unexpected network surges or dealing with advanced persistent threats (APTs). Communications and Media organizations are prime targets for threat actors, attributed, in part, to the numerous interconnected systems that create blindspots and impede visibility into vulnerabilities, the presence of malware, and other anomalies. 

Technologies that can provide situational awareness and automation can help you get ahead of these incidents while also giving you peace of mind that your customer-facing applications are reliable and secure. Solutions such as advanced threat detection can help you automatically identify suspicious activity as well as provide context for high-priority incidents to enable faster remediation. Splunk SIEM helped Unitel, Mongolia’s leading communications technology group, do just that, resulting in 2x-3x quicker incident response times and 50% faster log management. 

In addition to staying ahead of threat vectors, being proactive includes anticipating disruptions, or other issues that might lead to downtime or an outage. As you continue to build new cloud-native applications and infrastructure for your 5G rollout, cloud-native problem isolation also offers you dynamic telemetry maps, AI-guided troubleshooting capabilities, and tag analysis so that your engineering teams have a holistic view of your system’s health and performance. 

3. Optimize the Digital Experience

Once these elements are in place, you can focus on helping your customers get the most out of their digital experiences. To focus on customer innovation, Communications and Media organizations need their existing digital services and applications to work seamlessly out of the gate. It’s table stakes. 

To that end, application performance monitoring capabilities can quickly identify, isolate, alert, and troubleshoot any errors or anomalies that cause disruptions or latency and then optimize performance by understanding how APIs and third-party dependencies affect user experience. Optimized web and mobile performance can also help ensure that customers have unfettered uptime while sustaining strong performance. 

When customers have a smooth, uninterrupted web experience without worrying about disruptions, they can focus on the things that are most important to them. Plus, providing customers with a delightful, uninterrupted web and mobile experience will reduce churn and pave the way for new and repeat business down the road.

Setting the Stage for Resilience

In light of macroeconomic uncertainty, 5G rollouts, escalating disruptions, a more distributed environment, and an expanding attack surface that opens the door for new threats, communications, and media organizations are facing some major headwinds that they will undoubtedly be required to address in the near future. And resilience will be non-negotiable. Taking steps to lay a foundation of resilience ahead of time will allow them to navigate these challenges with ease — and help them better serve their customers when disaster inevitably strikes.

Learn more about how you can uplevel the customer experience, gain holistic visibility of your complex, hybrid environment and future proof your platform at our new Communications and Media solutions page.

Read about how your Communications and Media peers are using Splunk to detect network disruptions sooner, respond to security incidents faster and deliver better customer experiences with our Telecom customer e-book, Wired for Resilience.