How is your business protected against outages or cyberattacks?

As cyberattacks become increasingly fierce and more frequent by the minute, businesses have to up their guards and defend against these emerging threats.  

To make matters worse, power outages are expected to occur more frequently in the future due to strains on the power grids, controlled brownouts, and the risk of physical attacks on the power grid due to the tensions in Western Europe. 

These, and other threats, make the need to secure business continuity more prevailing than ever before. Businesses must acknowledge these risks and take necessary precautions to mitigate the threats. 

Outages has a devastating impact affecting all parts of business that not only hurt revenue but can also cause a lack of trust in the company. They can be caused by a lot of factors varying from misconfiguration, electrical outage, hardware failure, internet outage, cloud outage, cyberattacks, etc. 

Many businesses already go to great lengths and invest massively in security, high-availability, and redundancy solutions to secure business continuity if disaster strikes. 

And obviously, it’s necessary to take measures to secure continuity – but are we perhaps overcomplicating other parts of the strategy? 

The strain on Digital Experiences 

Digital experiences are the primary interface that customers see, and we’ve been fostered to expect that they are always available.  

When the digital experiences of a business are no longer available it not only impacts the customer experience and causes loss of revenue, but it might also hurt the confidence in the company. Unavailability might also spark fears that the company is struck by a cyberattack and in worst-case scenarios that sensitive data might be compromised. 

Most digital experiences often rely on one or more backend systems and, needless to say, when these systems become unavailable your digital – and customer – experiences are affected. 

In many applications, data are fetched, processed, and calculated by backend systems in real-time for each individual request – all of which might take a while. This makes the user wait and hurts the responsiveness and desirability of the user experience. 

In some cases, requests might trigger multiple requests to other business systems too, which extends the waiting time even further. In the worst-case scenario, one of the requests fails – and then the initial request fail all together. *sigh* 

When multiple users simultaneously make request the strain on the backend systems will multiply and might reduce performance or overload the systems. User requests might even be identical – and identical fetch, process, and calculations are executed multiple times, which puts unnecessary strain on the backend systems. As mentioned, the request might rely on requests to numerous other backend systems creating a ripple effect strain on those as well. 

Why asynchronous processing and caching is worth your while 

But what if your digital experiences were decoupled, didn’t depend on data from backend systems, and could continue even though the backend systems aren’t available – for instance due to an outage or if they’re shut down during longer periods or indefinitely? 

The core feature of Enterspeed is asynchronous processing and caching which adds a long list of advantages. Caching not only offloads the backend systems, putting less strain on them and makes data available much faster, but also protects the digital experience during an outage where backend business systems are wiped out. 

Want to know more about security through Enterspeed? 👉 Security by Design – let's keep you sharp

Your ability to scale and adapt applications is key to optimising not only the digital experiences and adapting to market changes but also cost and efficiency. Usually, scaling an application – no matter if it’s done horizontally or vertically – requires investments in increased cloud compute power, internet capacity, hardware, cooling and so on. But by processing and caching data asynchronously you eliminate real-time requests to backend systems and makes it much cheaper to scale the application.  

If horizontal scaling isn’t possible, the common ways to scale are by either vertical scaling or applying asynchronous processing and caching. In general, caching is a cost-effective way to scale an application – and it’s even a great way to reduce complexity and dramatically increase performance. 

Check out how to implement with Enterspeed 👉 Enterspeed Pattern for Asynchronous Processing

Improving sustainability by adopting an asynchronous approach 

From a sustainability perspective, asynchronous processing and caching makes great sense as well. Fewer requests to process and calculate means less energy wasted reducing the overall emissions of the application. If requests rely on other requests from external systems, the reductions are even greater because not only the emission caused by executing the requests are eliminated but also the emissions of transporting data across the internet. 

Furthermore, the asynchronous processing and caching can be scheduled to occur on hours of the day where sustainable electricity production is at peak, reducing application lifecycle CO2e emissions even further. 

In short, asynchronous processing and caching adds a host of benefits including increased protection against outages, reduces cost, increased flexibility, enables scaling, reduces complexity and vastly improves performance to name some of the advantages. 

Check out more about the business benefits to decoupling 👉 Boost your business with decoupled architecture