In an era where disruption is relentless and often unpredictable, enterprise applications are vulnerable to a range of threats, from undersea cable sabotage and AI deepfakes to restrictive regulations. As organizations rely on increasingly complex application ecosystems, it’s crucial to integrate resilience into applications to ensure business continuity. This involves adapting and preparing applications for emerging disruptions by diversifying infrastructure, investing in cybersecurity, and adopting sustainable practices to maintain business stability.

It is essential to consider a broad spectrum of disruptions, beyond just technology-driven ones, as all disruptions have complex, multidimensional impacts that require a comprehensive response.

Internet at risk

With nearly all global data transmitted through a limited number of undersea cables, natural disasters present a substantial threat to the global internet infrastructure. Events such as cyclones, submarine landslides, underwater volcanic eruptions, and earthquakes can cause significant disruptions. Additionally, irrational human activities, such as undersea cable sabotage, pose serious risks. These incidents could lead to widespread internet blackouts or isolate entire regions.

Cable breaks and sabotages can be mitigated through increased physical security, satellite internet and global cooperation. But the damage caused to the internet’s credibility through AI deepfakes and failure of key internet-based services could erode the trust in shared infrastructure and lead to internet fragmentation. Investment in cybersecurity technologies to guard against deepfakes and their integration into existing application ecosystems must be a top priority for organisations.

Furthermore, current IT infrastructure is highly interconnected, making it even more fragile. The recent July CrowdStrike outage demonstrated that the entire ecosystem must offer the highest levels of service delivery assurance to maintain the public’s trust in the system.

Organisations without adequate application redundancies and protections will struggle to recover in case of failures. To counter that, Gartner predicts 70% of companies will adopt regionally diversified supply chain models to improve network resiliency in the face of ongoing global disruptions by 2028.

Strangulation by regulation

Restrictive government regulations, often with a local regional focus, are disrupting the operations of multinational organisations. This includes technology vendors that depend on the free flow of data, technology and talent across borders. This will negatively impact their competitiveness and ability to provide a full suite of applications.

There has also been a steady uptick in government regulations related to technology development, use, transfer and sale. However, measures around data localisation have become more stringent and common. This has been driven by increased mistrust of other countries, motivations of major technology providers and growing concern about the unintended impacts of emerging technologies on society and the planet.

In response, multinational organisations could opt for a federated structure that necessitates a revision of global enterprise application strategies and a reassessment of global application delivery to more localised models.

Organisations can also address nationalisation risks by developing policies that require third-party vendors to adhere to their AI, privacy, localisation policies and regulations.

Serious sustainability

The recent global focus on inflation and economic headwinds has meant that very little concrete action has been taken to support sustainability. However, two key trends will force organisations to take sustainability seriously.

The first is transformation activities that fundamentally change IT’s energy footprint, such as the adoption of technologies like AI. Any organisation leveraging AI will have to do a lot more than they are currently doing to offset the environmental impact and meet their ESG targets.

The second is organisations now being indirectly accountable for the emissions through their vendors when they adopt more of an “as a service” model to consume their IT software and services. Gartner research shows a “say do” gap when managing GHG emissions from vendors, where there is a disparity between what organisations state they will do and what they actually end up doing.

This shift to a consumption-based model means that IT departments cannot estimate their carbon footprint, making it difficult for organisations to achieve their sustainability goals — especially related to GHG emissions.

Increasingly, organisations will need to undertake additional due diligence within the application decision-making and sourcing process to align with business cost, performance and environmental objectives. That includes making ESG either mandatory criteria or increasing its weighting as they evaluate vendors, as well as scrutinising their ongoing performance on sustainability targets.

As a whole, organisations need to engage and incentivise vendors to commit to agreed environmental sustainability targets and KPIs, then manage advancement towards targets by setting milestones that enable continuous progress.

The author is Neha Ralhan is a senior principal analyst at Gartner

Disclaimer: The views expressed are solely of the author and ETCIO does not necessarily subscribe to it. ETCIO shall not be responsible for any damage caused to any person/organization directly or indirectly.