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.
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.
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 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 (4-5 June, Santa Clara Convention Center), 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.”
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):
- ObservabilityAvailabilityMaintainabilityRecoverabilityScalabilityUsabilityIntegritySecurity
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. Companies can see their overall or per-app scores drift as changes are made – to the infrastructure, to code, to the portfolio of applications in production, and so on.
“The thought around resilience is that we as humans aren’t perfect. We’re going to make mistakes. But how do you come back? You want your applications to be fully, highly performant, always optimal, with the required uptime. But issues are going to happen. A code change is introduced that breaks something, or there’s more demand on a certain area that slows down performance. And so the application resilience we’re looking at is all around the ability of systems to withstand and recover quickly from disruptions, failures, spikes in demand, [and] unexpected events,” she says.
IBM’s acquisition history points to some of the complimentary elements of the Concert Resilience Posture solution – Instana for full-stack observability, Turbonomic for resource optimization, for example. But the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. There’s an AI-powered continuous assessment of all elements that make up an organization’s resilience, so there’s one place where decision-makers and IT teams can assess, manage, and configure the full-stack’s resilience profile.
The IBM portfolio of resilience-focused solutions helps teams see when and why loads change and therefore where resources are wasted. It’s possible to ensure that necessary resources are allocated only when needed, and systems automatically scale back when they’re not. That sort of business- and cost-centric capability is at the heart of app-centric resilience, and means that a company is always optimizing its resources.
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.
Jennifer says, “There’s a lot of different things that can impact resilience and that’s why it’s been so difficult to measure. An application has so many different layers underneath, even in just its resources and how it’s built. But then there’s the spider web of downstream impacts. A code change could impact multiple apps, or it could impact one piece of an app. What is the downstream impact of something going wrong? And that’s a big piece of what our tools are helping organizations with.”
You can read more about IBM’s work to make today and tomorrow’s applications resilient.
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