Your IT is the foundation of everything you create. Whether you're exploring new ways of working, engaging customers, or driving growth, having a resilient foundation is key to unlocking opportunities to capture new value.

Invest in resiliency, an adaptive workforce, and ongoing transformation to stay agile and grow your business.

Prioritize IT resiliency for growth and agility

In today's environment, market volatility, business and IT disruptions, evolving customer demands, and workforce changes have all become common place. Having a resilient IT is becoming increasingly critical for organizations. They need to anticipate and prepare for unexpected scenarios and respond with swiftness and agility.

Without a resilient IT in place, organizations struggle with operational and business performance. This is further complicated by the surge in technology-related disruptions -something 91% of IT leaders said they'd experienced. Outcomes have included data and revenue loss, as well as reputational damage.

Recently, organizations began to proactively invest in modernizing their infrastructure, software, and IT talent.  With a robust strategy for sustaining operations through uncertainty, they are able to quickly transition to a remote workforce and create a fully optimized digital infrastructure and customer experience.

Stay nimble amidst the unexpected

To survive and thrive in this new reality, it's critical for organizations to stay nimble by investing in an adaptive workforce, in addition to a resilient IT. Together, this can drive meaningful change and technology-inspired innovation.

Cisco Business Critical Services (BCS) created an operational model for business resiliency, enabling organizations to perform even in challenging times. Grounded in best practices and Cisco intellectual capital, organizations can use the BCS framework to drive transformation by improving IT resiliency and adaptability.

The BCS model for business resiliency

• Resilient IT: Optimize performance and de-risk IT to increase capacity and availability, no matter where you work.
• Adaptive IT: Engineer an adaptive workforce with the right technical expertise to address your changing priorities.
• Transformative IT: Empower roles across your IT landscape to react quickly to change and drive innovation.

When this model is used in conjunction with BCS' multi-tiered lifecycle services, organizations of all sizes can respond quickly to changing priorities. With the help of an adaptive workforce and access to analytics and insight, continuous transformation strengthens infrastructure and supports emerging workforce models.

Prepare for a resilient future

How do you start to build resiliency?

Begin by assessing areas of improvement in your IT environment. Focus on process, design, and operational best practices to improve stability, capacity, and availability. This will also help to identify root causes and mitigate the risk of recurring or systemic problems that can impact performance.

The next step to a resilient future is to leverage specialized expertise and AI/ML-powered technologies like predictive analytics to harness the power of automation and expertise to resolve issues faster.

Build an adaptive workforce

Organizations need a highly adaptive workforce with specialized expertise to tackle large transformations, priority projects and unplanned events throughout their lifecycle. 76% of organizations can't easily find the expertise they need to address evolving business priorities. Experts in remote work, network operations management, cybersecurity, and AI are in high demand.

With the ongoing talent shortage, it is advantageous to have access to dedicated experts in cutting-edge technologies to fill critical roles. Through a workshop, you can leverage subject matter experts and use cases in security, collaboration, data center, and networking technology to find a solution. Our specialized experts can provide tailored, data-driven recommendations using a broad range of methodologies to help you determine where your IT models are stretched or broken, and where the risks and opportunities lie.

According to Forrester, the most adaptive organizations can experience three times faster revenue growth than their competition. Tap into the right skill sets, where and when you need them. Solve new and unfamiliar complex problems and thrive in uncertain environments. Evolve to an adaptive IT proactively, not just out of necessity. The payoff can be huge.

The power of transformative IT

Earlier this year, the University of Maryland Medical System realized it needed to quickly set up temporary connected field hospitals to support a surge in hospital admissions. It turned to Cisco. In just five days, we connected 28,000 employees across 13 field hospitals and 5,000 homes with the Cisco BCS IT infrastructure kit, including wireless networking technology, integrated network security, and deployment guidance.

In the past six months, we've developed thousands of secure VPN environments, connecting customers with their customers to create productive remote workforces.

The ability to drive change through continuous innovation, even during challenging times, is one of the many advantages of transformative IT. With the right people, processes, and technology in place, organizations can reimagine how they create and capture new value as their business priorities shift. They are also equipped to capitalize on technology-driven innovation to deliver four times the revenue growth of their peers.

Master your next chapter

For 35 years, Cisco has been helping organizations transform to achieve greater resiliency, adaptability and speed. We recently restructured the BCS lifecycle portfolio into a multi-tiered subscription service to help you achieve a resilient, adaptive, and transformative IT.

With our Essentials, Advantage, and Premier pre-packaged tiers, you gain access to the expertise you need -at every step of your Cisco lifecycle journey. Our Specialized Expertise (Scrum Services and Expert-as-a-Service) provide targeted guidance from dedicated experts to help you build an adaptive workforce.

Services include continuous engagement with Cisco and partner experts, powered by the analytics, insights, and automation of Cisco Collaborative Intelligence. With Cisco Business Critical Services, you have the foundation you need to create resilient, adaptive, and transformative IT to accelerate growth and agility.

Find out how Cisco Business Critical Services can help you stay ahead of the unexpected, always.

If you missed our webinar on how to create resilient, adaptive, and transformative IT, you can watch it on demand.

Check out our Turn on a Dime video to learn more about how you can create resilient, adaptive, and transformative IT with Cisco.