Business resilience is a key factor for business success in 2020 and beyond as businesses cope with an increasingly uncertain and volatile landscape.

Successful companies must purposefully develop the ability to tackle ambiguity and unpredictability.

While COVID-19 has emphasised the immediate need for resilience, the ever-changing business world means organisations must embrace smart transformation now and into the future, according to Micro Focus, a global software and IT business.

The pandemic has forced more than half (52 per cent) of organisations globally to reconfigure operations and adopt new business models as vulnerabilities are exposed.

Digital technologies let companies implement a proactive strategy built on adapting operations and building resilience for the long term.

“At the onset of COVID-19, many businesses scrambled to adapt to the new conditions, affected by their lack of digital readiness,” says Micro Focus ANZ managing director Peter Fuller.

“This highlighted the slow-moving nature of legacy and siloed systems, now acting as a liability for organisations.”

As a result, more companies are turning to digital technologies to build a more resilient, flexible enterprise, with 41 per cent of global executives now increasing their spend on automation, a new survey shows.

The future of work will be digital, with organisations dependent on data, analytics, digital tools and technologies, as well as automation and artificial intelligence (AI).

Mr Fuller says the role of business leaders isn’t about simply recovering from a crisis, it’s about moving forward into a new reality.

As organisations learn to adjust to the new normal, they need to cultivate four key capabilities to ensure they build a resilient business:

1. 1. Speed. Interconnected and legacy devices are slow and lack control. Organisations must connect, map and visualise the software delivery lifecycle to gain velocity and deliver applications faster, and with more control. This ensures organisations can transform core business systems with a lower risk.
2. Agility. The ever-changing nature of business means that managing IT environments is often complex. To increase productivity and reduce risk, organisations need to rely on automation technologies such as AI or robotic process automation (RPA).
3. 3. Security. All employees or contractors intentionally and unintentionally expose corporate data to risk. Companies must protect IT ecosystems and heterogeneous environments by taking a zero trust security approach where everything and everyone on the network is considered a potential threat.
4. Insights. Real-time data provides business leaders with evidence-based insights that inform strategic decisions. AI and machine learning (ML) help businesses understand and extract value from the data, and accelerate business outcomes without compromises.

“Organisations must invest in the future now with new capabilities for infrastructure, intelligence and innovation,” says Mr Fuller.

“While modernising for the long-term is challenging, it reaps greater rewards with disruptive capabilities, ensuring businesses remain flexible and resilient today, and into the future.”