Boosting the digital resilience of Australia's critical infrastructure
Australia’s critical infrastructure highly depends on interconnected digital systems, including information technology (IT), operational technology (OT), and communications networks. While these systems can fail, possibly leading to large-scale disruptions of critical services, they can also play an important role in providing resilience against such disruptions. This whitepaper examines how Australian critical infrastructure operators understand, assess, and strengthen digital resilience, defined as the ability of systems and networks to respond to, recover from, and adapt to disruption while maintaining essential functions and acceptable performance. Its aim is to provide solution architects with best practices and recommendations that can improve the resilience of the critical services their organisations provide to their customers.
Through literature-based case study analysis and in-depth interviews with critical infrastructure operators across multiple sectors, our findings indicate that digital resilience is now regarded as a core, all-of-business, organisational capability rather than a purely technical concern. While redundancy remains an important design principle, the most resilient organisations are not necessarily those with the greatest level of technical duplication, but those with the strongest capabilities for detection, isolation, recovery, adaptation, and operational decision-making.