Introduction to Application Resilience
Back when most business applications were monolithic, ensuring their resilience was by no means easy. But given the way apps run in 2025 and what’s expected of them, maintaining monolithic apps was arguably simpler. Back then, IT staff had a finite set of criteria on which to improve an application’s resilience, and the rate of change to the application and its infrastructure was a great deal slower. Today, the demands we place on apps are different, more numerous, and subject to a faster rate of change.
The Complexity of Modern Applications
There are also just more applications. According to IDC, there are likely to be a billion more in production by 2028 – and many of these will be running on cloud-native code and mixed infrastructure. With technological complexity and higher service expectations of responsiveness and quality, ensuring resilience has grown into being a massively more complex ask. Multi-dimensional elements determine app resilience, dimensions that fall into different areas of responsibility in the modern enterprise: Code quality falls to development teams; infrastructure might be down to systems administrators or DevOps; compliance and data governance officers have their own needs and stipulations, as do cybersecurity professionals, storage engineers, database administrators, and a dozen more besides.
Challenges in Ensuring Resilience
With multiple tools designed to ensure the resilience of an app – with definitions of what constitutes resilience depending on who’s asking – it’s small wonder that there are typically dozens of tools that work to improve and maintain resilience in play at any one time in the modern enterprise. Determining resilience across the whole enterprise’s portfolio, therefore, is near-impossible. Monitoring software is silo-ed, and there’s no single pane of reference.
IBM’s Concert Resilience Posture
IBM’s Concert Resilience Posture simplifies the complexities of multiple dashboards, normalizes the different quality judgments, breaks down data from different silos, and unifies the disparate purposes of monitoring and remediation tools in play. Speaking ahead of TechEx North America, Jennifer Fitzgerald, Product Management Director, Observability, at IBM, took us through the Concert Resilience Posture solution, its aims, and its ethos. On the latter, she differentiates it from other tools: “Everything we’re doing is grounded in applications – the health and performance of the applications and reducing risk factors for the application.”
Key Features of Concert Resilience Posture
The app-centric approach means the bringing together of the different metrics in the context of desired business outcomes, answering questions that matter to an organization’s stakeholders, like:
- Will every application scale?
- What effects have code changes had?
- Are we over- or under-resourcing any element of any application?
- Is infrastructure supporting or hindering application deployment?
- Are we safe and in line with data governance policies?
- What experience are we giving our customers?
Jennifer says IBM Concert Resilience Posture is, “a new way to think about resilience – to move it from a manual stitching [of other tools] or a ton of different dashboards.” Although the definition of resilience can be ephemeral, according to which criteria are in play, Jennifer says it’s comprised, at its core, of eight non-functional requirements (NFRs): - Observability
- Availability
- Maintainability
- Recoverability
- Scalability
- Usability
- Integrity
- Security
Benefits of Concert Resilience Posture
NFRs are important everywhere in the organization, and there are perhaps only two or three that are the sole remit of one department – security falls to the CISO, for example. But ensuring the best quality of resilience in all of the above is critically important right across the enterprise. It’s a shared responsibility for maintaining excellence in performance, potential, and safety. What IBM Concert Resilience Posture gives organizations, different from what’s offered by a collection of disparate tools and beyond the single-pane-of-glass paradigm, is proactivity. Proactive resilience comes from its ability to give a resilience score, based on multiple metrics, with a score determined by the many dozens of data points in each NFR.
Conclusion
Overarching all aspects of app performance and resilience is the element of cost. Throwing extra resources at an under-performing application (or its supporting infrastructure) isn’t a viable solution in most organizations. With IBM, organizations get the ability to scale and grow, to add or iterate apps safely, without necessarily having to invest in new provisioning, either in the cloud or on-premise. Plus, they can see how any changes impact resilience. It’s making best use of what’s available, and winning back capacity – all while getting the best performance, responsiveness, reliability, and uptime across the enterprise’s application portfolio.
FAQs
Q: What is application resilience?
A: Application resilience refers to the ability of an application to withstand and recover quickly from disruptions, failures, spikes in demand, and unexpected events.
Q: What are the key features of IBM’s Concert Resilience Posture?
A: The key features of IBM’s Concert Resilience Posture include its ability to simplify the complexities of multiple dashboards, normalize different quality judgments, and unify the disparate purposes of monitoring and remediation tools.
Q: What are the benefits of using IBM’s Concert Resilience Posture?
A: The benefits of using IBM’s Concert Resilience Posture include its ability to provide a resilience score, based on multiple metrics, and its proactive approach to resilience, which allows organizations to scale and grow safely without necessarily having to invest in new provisioning.
Q: What is the importance of non-functional requirements (NFRs) in application resilience?
A: NFRs are important everywhere in the organization, and there are perhaps only two or three that are the sole remit of one department. Ensuring the best quality of resilience in all of the above is critically important right across the enterprise.
Q: How does IBM’s Concert Resilience Posture help organizations optimize their resources?
A: IBM’s Concert Resilience Posture helps organizations optimize their resources by providing a single pane of reference, allowing them to see how any changes impact resilience, and making best use of what’s available, and winning back capacity – all while getting the best performance, responsiveness, reliability, and uptime across the enterprise’s application portfolio.
