We live in the era of NOW. If a website takes too long to load, or doesn't load at all, we will move on in a matter of milliseconds. If an ATM can't dispense cash — unacceptable. Our favorite online store is unavailable — unheard of. Not only have our expectations risen to astronomical heights, but our increasing dependence on technology means we can't cope without it. If our electronic medical records are unavailable — lives are at stake. If the utility's critical IT systems go down — millions are left without power.

We also live in the age of the customer. The most forward-looking companies are orienting themselves around delivering the best possible customer experience. For many, this means redesigning web interfaces, integrating more technology into storefronts, developing mobile applications, and streamlining processes. But what about improving uptime, availability, and resiliency? Isn't this the baseline that everything else depends upon to have any type of customer experience?

I've found that resiliency initiatives often fail to get momentum because they are so focused on disasters and downtime, and fail to link back to critical business processes and services. Too often, infrastructure and operations professionals focus on server uptime or network uptime, and fail to see the big picture, that what the business really cares about is services, not individual components. But let's take this a step further, we should be focusing our investments in resiliency on the customer experience. It doesn't matter if the data center is under 5 feet of water or if someone accidentally deleted a critical file, if the customer experience suffers, we need to have a plan.

I'll be diving into more depth on this topic, with customer case studies and specific examples of where you can embed resiliency into infrastructure and operations in order to make your customer experience as bulletproof as possible at our Forum For CIO, EA, Infrastructure & Ops, Security & Risk, And Sourcing Professionals this May. I hope you'll be able to join me there, but in the meantime, I'd love to hear thoughts and feedback here on this blog.