Digital Immune Systems (DIS) is an approach that integrates software development, design, operation, and analytics to improve product development processes by mitigating risks and threats to data and reducing software bugs and failures that impact overall business performance.
It’s all about preventive action. A 2012 research paper on the rise of DIS describes “it would work in much the same way as an adaptive, biological immune system: by observing the microbial landscape, detecting potential threats, and neutralizing them before they spread beyond control”.
A digital immune system is, essentially, an extension and an upgrade to Bill Gates’ definition of a digital nervous system, which he extensively discussed in his book published in 1999, Business at the Speed of Thought.
In a recent Gartner survey, they found that 45% of businesses focus their digital investments on the purpose of further developing a better CX. DIS is now a critical approach to optimizing product testing and implementation, improving customer experience.
How Your Business Can Begin Implementing DIS
An integrated digital immune system (DIS) can benefit your business in multiple ways, from streamlining processes and workflows, to successfully navigating digital transformation and building or scaling a digital product.
Gartner has proposed six requirements for a strong digital immune system, and they include:
Observability: Integrating observability into applications reduces issues with reliability and resilience by monitoring user behavior. Observability helps teams better understand how their products are being used, and what improvements need to be made for a better customer experience.
AI-Augmented Testing: Automating software testing expands on conventional test automation. It entirely automates integral testing activities, including planning, creation, maintenance, and analysis.
Chaos Engineering: An approach to identifying unforeseen and previously unknown weaknesses of your system. It deliberately disrupts the system to pinpoint weaknesses, predict failures, and correct the systems’ architecture to anticipate user experience.
Auto-remediation: Builds monitoring capabilities based on the available data and automatically remedies functions into an application. Auto-remediation monitors itself and automatically rectifies issues upon detecting them, returning to a normal working state without the need for human intervention.
Site Reliability Engineering: SRE consists of a set of engineering principles and practices that revolve around CX optimization and retention through support from service-level objectives to monitor service management. It reduces the effort needed by development teams on creating solutions and enables them to focus on nurturing UX.
Software Supply Chain Security: Software bills of materials (SBOM), is an inventory of open-source software components that make up a codebase. They improve the visibility, transparency, and strength of code in software supply chains.
Frances Karamouzis, a Gartner VP and analyst, stated that “76% of digital teams are responsible for revenue, and they need to ensure things like reliability and scalability.” She then shared how American Airlines and Banco Itau implemented DIS to gain increased operational resiliency and scalability, and to automate incident resolution systems.
Your organization’s digital transformation is safer with DIS, by automating the testing of bug fixes, performing penetration tests, and predicting system failures to ensure rapid recovery and operational continuity.
Capacitor Partners, together with trusted partners, can help employ DIS to ultimately assist your product teams to stay focused on innovation and customer experience.
Upscale your product management capability with our expert team at Capacitor Partners. Reach out to us at hi [at] capacitorpartners.com for more details.