Digital Immune System (DIS)

 A digital immune system (DIS) combines practices and technologies for software design, development, operations and analytics to mitigate business risks. (Gartner)

Why it matters: When customers encounter slow or poorly performing systems their experiences are compromised resulting in dissatisfaction and even transaction abandonment. A DIS eliminates or minimizes system failures creating exceptional user experiences which lead to superior business performance.

6 concepts to consider when building a digital immune system

Joachim Herschmann, senior director analyst on the application design and development team at Gartner recommends that organizations start developing a DIS by first creating a strong vision statement taking into account the following:

• Observability permits “seeing” of systems and software.
  By incorporating observability into programs, developers are able to alleviate reliability and resilience problems and enhance user experience (UX).
• AI augmented testing enables businesses to gradually remove human assistance from are testing processes.
• Chaos engineering employs experimental testing to find flaws and vulnerabilities in complicated systems. Teams can safely perfect the technique in non-intrusive, test-first environments when applied there. They can then apply what they’ve learned to regular operations and production hardening.
• Autoremediation focuses on integrating automatic remediation features and context-sensitive monitoring capabilities directly into an application. Without the assistance of operations employees, it self-monitors, automatically fixes problems when it notices them, and then resumes regular functioning. It can also avoid problems by fixing a poor user experience by combining chaotic engineering and observability.
• Site reliability engineering (SRE) is a set of engineering concepts and methods that employs service-level goals to control service management and focuses on enhancing CX and retention.
  It minimizes the effort of development teams on remediation and tech debt but allows for more attention on developing an engaging UX. It also balances the need for velocity against stability and risk.
• Software supply chain security considers the danger of supply chain attacks on software. The security, integrity, and visibility of both proprietary and open-source code in software supply chains are all improved by software bills of materials. The integrity of internal and external code is protected by strict version-control procedures, the usage of artifact repositories for trusted content, and controlling vendor risk throughout the delivery life cycle.