The Digital Immune System (DIS) Explained

To ensure smooth, functioning technology-driven operations and services, building resilience into digitally transformed organizations is critical.

Today, when products and services are consumed over the Web, with connected devices and an application interface that must appeal to a diverse user base, the customer experience of engaging with your business services in the digital world determines your business success. 

In short, you need immunity, so you’re insusceptible or resistant to certain inevitabilities. And that’s the goal of the Digital Immune System.

Digital immunity: What’s a digital immune system?

Digital Immune System (DIS) refers to the combination of practices and technologies that ensure a functional and streamlined customer experience of a digitally driven business product or service. Analyst firm Gartner named DIS a top strategic trend of 2023, saying:

“A digital immune system (DIS) combines practices and technologies for software design, development, operations and analytics to mitigate business risks. Here’s what to know.”

The digital immune system takes the human immune system as its example. The idea behind DIS is simple: advanced technologies that drive a business service are incredibly complex — and, therefore, they’re highly sensitive to things like:

• Faults
• Dependency issues
• Configuration and coding changes
• Workload distribution
• Traffic pattern changes

(Read about more Gartner trends: adaptive AI, applied observability, sustainable technology, and AI trust, risk & security management.)

Goals of the digital immune system

In order to address these issues, the process framework and technology solutions that make up a Digital Immune System are characterized by the following end-goals and objectives:

Resilient operating environment

Business organizations need operating models and an IT environment that can empower them to innovate and adapt continuously. This agility comes at a cost and an expectation: enterprise IT environments are complex, failures can escalate and spread across the network rapidly, and users expect near-zero downtime of the technology service.

Accelerated digital delivery

Users expect a fully functional and streamlined experience across all digital channels. This involves your adoption of:

• Intelligent automation capabilities
• An agile framework
• Simplified processes that reduce the time to design, develop and deliver a product

Reliable end user experience

The attention span of a website visitor — like you — is around eight seconds. To deliver web experiences that meet this small window, DIS technologies and practices encompass both the dependability of your apps performances as well as cybersecurity resilience, which includes:

• Incident response
• Fault tolerance
• Risk mitigation
• Recovery with an acceptable MTTR

Innovation & fast reaction to market

Advanced analytics capabilities help discover industry and market trends and extract actionable insights from real-time data.

While organizations have easy access to large volumes of multimodal and multi-structured data streams, a data platform and pipeline that can handle analytics processing efficiently and at scale gives large enterprises the flexibility and agility of their smaller counterparts for reacting to changing market conditions.

(Splunk is a data platform that delivers all sorts of use cases for you — especially those that require real-time response.)

Business value

DIS systems attribute business value to specific customer experience (CX) and business performance metrics. There’s a particular focus on features and functionality that can have a direct impact on the revenue. A DIS process framework can:

• Follow an Agile, SRE or DevOps-driven software development methodologies.
• Use automation tools to accelerate delivery.
• Include a provision for improving on customer feedback.

DIS technologies fit into the existing DevOps framework and introduce an additional goal of improving customer experience by building resilient operational processes and technologies.

Technologies that power Digital Immunity

OK, so, in short, Digital Immunity Systems create resilient business processes — but how do they get there? These key technologies power DIS and help achieve business resilience.

Automation

DIS systems can automate several functions of the SDLC and analytics pipeline. A primary automation of DIS tools includes the automation of workflow processes and repetitive resiliency tasks, like backup and recovery.

You can also automate noncompliant configurations and digital assets by discovering assets, their configurations and then associating them with the applicable remediation actions according to the predefined rules.

Observability

DIS tools analyze network logs, business KPIs and metrics, and traces to identify, discover and monitor data assets and IT workloads in cloud environments. Observability becomes important in microservices use cases where software components run across multiple distributed but highly connected service environments.

Additional use cases include:

• Auditing network activity for security
• Health monitoring of connected services in the cloud
• Log aggregation for a variety of analytics applications

(Understand how telemetry, monitoring & observability come together.)

AI testing & software supply chain security

DIS systems evaluate security of your software from a supply chain risk perspective and rely on AI testing for highly parallel continuous testing and real-time monitoring practices for cybersecurity. This approach helps mitigate the security risk: that’s because all existing components, processes and configurations involved in developing the software are protected against known threats from all directions.

DIS also guides on managing Zero-day vulnerability risks by analyzing network logs in real time for potentially anomalous incidents and events.

Chaos engineering & SRE

Digital Immune Systems combine elements of Chaos Engineering with Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) for improved customer experience and business resilience.

The goal is to reduce the impact of unexpected service disruptions by adopting an automated and streamlined approach for business continuity and operational readiness. It achieves this goal by focusing service management framework decisions based on service level objectives (SLOs) for uptime and dependability, among other characteristics of a highly available IT service.

Build digital immunity: not unlike DevSecOps

Another way to look at Digital Immunity is the DevSecOps methodology, which introduces additional collaborative security requirements and expectations across all teams that contribute to the SDLC pipeline. This means that building a Digital Immunity System is not a responsibility of only QA and InfoSec teams, but the additional responsibilities hold for Dev and Ops teams.

So, instead of aiming for a feature sprawl and ‘move fast and break things’ mindset, DevSecOps, together with Digital Immunity System solutions and practices, organizations can aim to build resilient customer experiences instead of pushing out new features with every release cycle.