The corona pandemic has shown more than ever: IT plays a key role in companies and society. IT service provider Consol names five measures that make IT systems robust in the long term and thus prepare them for future crisis situations.
The Corona crisis has presented small and medium-sized companies in particular with major challenges or made existing problems visible – especially with regard to their IT systems. Companies with a low degree of digitization or outdated software systems sometimes had to make considerable investments so that employees in the home office could securely access the company network and continue to work productively.
Companies can now draw the right conclusions from this experience. You can identify risks and take suitable measures to make your IT systems crisis-proof.
To determine the risks, a company should first carry out IT and security audits. In addition, the entire IT system landscape can be examined and evaluated with regard to future security. With workshops and interview techniques combined with research, such audits can provide valuable insights and make them tangible.
In order to make critical IT systems robust in the long term, Consol recommends the following five concrete measures:
• Establishment of a resilient, that is, fail-safe hardware and software architecture. This can range from your own hardware and software cluster to operation in the company’s internal or external cloud. Attention should be paid to geographically distributed locations. With Docker or cloud-native concepts, resilience can also be improved on the software side.
• Use of the digitization options within the IT processes: The intelligent automation in areas such as source and test code generation or build, test and release automation relieves the IT significantly and creates scope for additional customer-oriented investments.
• Implementation of the most lean and uniform technology stack possible: The standardization and simplification of the IT stack means that security and other non-functional system updates no longer necessarily have to fail because of the costs. In addition, architecture approaches such as microservices can ensure that updates can be carried out in smaller and more manageable portions.
• Selection of future-proof and widely used technologies: Nothing is more annoying than the introduction of a technology that has disappeared from the scene again after a few years and no longer has manufacturer support. Consol recommends checking the future security and future availability of qualified employees before making any technology decision.
• Contaminated and fault-free: If software systems do not have any open errors and function in accordance with the specifications under all known circumstances, the responsible IT team can always react immediately and adequately to new problem reports. Optimal functionality and high software quality can only be ensured through holistic and automated end-2-end testing.
“All of the measures mentioned involve investments and internal persuasion and can therefore only be implemented in the medium and long term,” explains Christian Wied, Team Leader Software Engineering at Consol. “But with a view to future security, they are absolutely necessary. The corona pandemic has shown more than clearly how important a modern IT infrastructure is for companies. You should therefore start IT modernization and automation better today than tomorrow. “
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