The AI era has compelled Indian enterprises to actively prioritize the foundational challenge of data management, placing the utmost importance on storing, disseminating, and safeguarding data. This focus is non-negotiable, as affirmed by a recent industry report: around 54% Indian enterprises cite poor data quality as a major barrier to AI success. Indian organizations understand that bad data management leads to misapplication of AI, which leads to bad business outcomes.
The stakes have never been higher with cybersecurity incidents in India rising, and the average cost of a data breach reaching an all-time high of ₹22 crore in 2025. When facing data management issues or IT disruptions that threaten valuable business data, there’s always the temptation to believe the right technology can be a catch-all to fix every issue. However, proper IT functions and data management in the age of AI demand something more. It needs a strategy, a framework, and even a mindset rooted in operational resilience.
Overcoming Disruptions Through People and Processes
Indian IT teams face significant challenges in managing disruptions, often yielding to the temptation to look for technology-based solutions that can make things easier. While the right tooling is important for every IT function, technology in a silo may create more issues. IT leaders overwhelmingly believe that workflows and teams were more important for operational resilience than tooling. For example, 51% said processes were making it difficult for them to respond to IT disruptions quickly, and 36% said teams— or not having enough people — didn’t allow them to be as resilient as they’d like. Only 13% cited tooling as their primary roadblock to operational resilience.
Building the resilience necessary for today’s IT teams sits at the nexus of tools, teams, and workflows. When all three work together, it becomes much easier to prevent disruptions due to user error, cyber incidents, and system downtime.
Building Operational Resilience in IT
To properly analyze the people-technology relationship, teams should first ensure they have a complete understanding of their IT environment. This requires developing a system map that correlates every piece of data, IT asset, and login, using a comprehensive observability to visualize these critical IT functions. After mapping IT assets, enterprises must review their organizational structure to determine relationships among team members, including who works together, who each person reports to, and how large each team is.
Once there is sufficient understanding of the relationships between tooling and teams, it is crucial to identify which processes work and which don’t. One of the best ways to accomplish this is by surveying current team members, who are best equipped to identify areas for improvement within each team and with each tool.
After identifying issues, it’s time to address them. Solutions may involve anything from clarifying work styles to a decision to restructure certain teams. It’s also possible that the team works well together but simply lacks the proper technology. If proper tooling is lacking, teams must develop a detailed pitch that will resonate with leadership by mapping new technology back to business goals.
Enhancing Competitive Edge
Once organizations have implemented steps to improve operational resilience, it’s important to measure how successful these improvements are. For many in the tech industry, the MTTx metric, also known as Mean Time to Detect, Mean Time to Acknowledge and/or Mean Time to Resolve, is a great way to measure improvements in incident management and response times. If, for some reason, there is an uptick in IT incidents and it’s taking longer to resolve them, IT leaders may need to go back to the drawing board to review what’s not working. If the goal is operational resilience, IT leaders are driving toward not only a reduced mean time to resolve, but also a drop in the incidents that could potentially harm their data, assets, and overall IT system.
The path forward for Indian organizations requires a comprehensive approach that balances the country’s ambitious digital transformation goals with robust risk management. With 93% of Indian organization leaders planning to increase AI spending in 2025, the highest number globally, and the digital economy projected to contribute 20% of GDP by 2026, operational resilience has become not just a defensive strategy but a competitive advantage in India’s rapidly evolving digital landscape.
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