The expansion of digital services and solutions continues to put pressure on information technology departments to deliver more reliable, scalable platforms.

“Resilience” has been the buzzword for how to thrive amidst changing environments, and organizations that fail to incorporate it into their operating environments are seeing the effect in key business measures such as customer satisfaction or user abandonment.

In 2022 and the years following, Gartner expects IT leaders to adopt five key components in their strategic roadmaps to ensure adaptive resilience across their digital platforms. They are:

Software supply chain security

High-profile attacks on IT operations tool providers, such as SolarWinds and Kaseya, present a serious and imminent threat to IT resilience. IT and security leaders are finding that the very tools used to ensure service reliability and resilience or continuous delivery are now a potential target, leaving organizations completely exposed. They must be constantly vigilant and guide their teams to protect the integrity of the software included in their tools.

By 2025, 40% of organizations will enforce software supply chain security measures to improve IT resilience, up from fewer than 5% in 2021.

Increased regulatory measures and government mandates that aim to bring end-to-end transparency in the software development, procurement and deployment process are expected. In the next five years, operations monitoring and security monitoring use cases will converge, driven by adoption of DevSecOps, cloud-native architectural patterns, site reliability engineering or SRE, and product team operating models.

AI-augmented DevOps

There is an urgent need to master DevOps practices at both large scale and high velocity to ensure high-quality software delivery. To succeed, IT leaders need to develop their teams’ competency in artificial intelligence and machine learning to optimize development, testing and operations to remove bottlenecks and accelerate release cadence.

The future will be dominated by AI-augmented development and testing approaches that are well-integrated into an overall DevOps strategy. AI-augmented DevOps practices rely on AI-enabled tools to identify applications that will most benefit from a reduction of human intervention and augment every phase of the pipeline. This is a game-changer for software engineering, as up to 70% of a software engineer’s work might be automated in the future.

By 2025, 30% of enterprises will have implemented an AI-augmented development and testing strategy, up from only 5% in 2021.

Site reliability engineering

Boards and CEOs expect business critical applications are always up and running, fault free and even exceed customer expectations. The reality is that IT leaders sometimes struggle to plan for all eventualities of how modern, highly distributed software systems might fail.

SRE emphasizes the engineering disciplines that lead to improved reliability. It is a collection of systems and principles used to design and operate scalable, resilient systems.

Site reliability engineers work with the customer or product owner to understand operational requirements and define service-level objectives or SLOs. SRE practices help break down silos between traditional operational, disaster recovery and product teams. SLOs and error budgets help promote an engineering mindset that focuses on continuous innovation while improving reliability.

By the end of 2025, 30% of enterprises will establish new roles focused on IT resilience and boost end-to-end reliability, tolerability and recoverability by at least 45%.

Chaos engineering

Chaos engineering is the use of experimental and potentially destructive failure testing to uncover vulnerabilities and weaknesses within a complex system. The two largest drivers of chaos engineering are complexity in systems and increasing customer expectations, and Gartner client inquiries on the topics of SRE and chaos engineering have grown over 70% year over year since July 2019.

Chaos engineering is on the rise in the 2021 Gartner Hype Cycle for Software Engineering, as maximizing uptime for customers becomes increasingly important in the virtual-first world. Gartner expects 40% of organizations to implement chaos engineering practices as part of SRE initiatives, improving mean time to repair by an average of 90% by 2025.

Automated incident response

Traditional incident response approaches involve manual processes with limited collaboration between teams and slow response time. Incident response is a staple automation opportunity — allowing organizations to map automated responses to specific incidents.

AIR broadens the scope of events that can be managed by automating most of the incident response steps, enabling centralized alert or incident routing with a policy or rule-based engine, on-call scheduling and escalation, or streamlined collaboration. These approaches enable learning from the events that occur and iteratively implementing and improving response actions.

By 2025, 30% of infrastructure and operations teams will adopt AIR to address operational resilience improvements, up from 5% in 2021.

Hassan Ennaciri is a senior research director at Gartner Inc., focusing on a range of infrastructure and operations initiatives. He wrote this article for SiliconANGLE. Ennaciri and other Gartner analysts are presenting at the IT Infrastructure, Operations & Cloud Strategies Conference, taking place virtually this week in the Americas.

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