RESILIENCY IN THE COGNITIVE ERA IN AN ALWAYS-ON WORLD, REAL-TIME DATA FLOW AND CONTINUOUSLY CONNECTED COGNITIVE APPLICATIONS WILL BE ESSENTIAL IN ASSOCIATION WITH: CONTENTS Executive summary ........................................................ 2 Key points ................................................................. 3 Introduction ...............................................................4 What changes in the cognitive era? .......................................... 7 Always on: The importance of continuous availability in the cognitive era....... 9 The benefits will be breathtaking. So should the resiliency. ....................11 How cognitive capabilities can improve resiliency .............................13 Conclusion.................................................................15 Acknowledgments ........................................................ 16 EXECUTIVE SUMMARY Cognition enables a new level of engagement with technology and a new class of products and services that sense, reason and learn about their users and the world around them. A cognitive system capitalizes on data from internal and external sources for continuous learning and better forecasting for real-time analytics in a fraction of the time it would take a human. To take full advantage of these capabilities requires a high degree of resilience; data must be accurate, available, accessible and auditable. New cognitive applications are increasing expectations and raising resiliency requirements for the overall enterprise as well as its IT and data environment. At the same time, cognitive capabilities can help an organization maintain an always- on environment and meet business continuity and disaster recovery goals in a predictive and proactive way. 2 | RESILIENCY IN THE COGNITIVE ERA KEY POINTS Cognitive computing has arrived. It is enabling a new class of products and services that sense, reason and learn about their users and the world around them. This is already happening in industries including automotive, medical, hospitality, government, media, games, manufacturing, travel, engineering, law, pharmaceutical and science. As cognitive computing becomes part of our everyday world, it has the potential to radically redefine everyday life, changing how companies deliver products and services, engage and interact with customers, learn and make decisions. In the cognitive era the continuous availability of data, systems, applications and business processes is essential. It will increasingly be taken for granted that the service is “always on.” Applying advanced analytics and automation to predict potential issues and enable systems to be corrected proactively will enable businesses to seize new opportunities and defend against disruption. IBM is investing in new capabilities to help clients move from reactive business continuity and disaster recovery planning to a cognitive, predictive and pro- active resiliency program. The goal: to avoid the impact of a disaster before it occurs. COPYRIGHT © 2016 FORBES INSIGHTS | 3 INTRODUCTION Five years ago, the world was introduced to Watson, IBM’s cognitive computing system, which defeated two human champions in an exhibition match of the American game show Jeopardy. Watson has learned a lot since then, tackling ever more complex data sets to develop understanding, reasoning and learning capabilities that go far beyond answering trivia questions. Watson is helping oil and gas companies combine Kelly III, senior vice president, IBM Research and So- seismic imaging data with analyses of papers and lutions Portfolio. Cognitive systems are probabilistic. reports, current events, economic data and weather “That means they can take all the data we ask them forecasts to outline risk-and-reward scenarios before to look at…and generate hypotheses, reasoned drilling. Financial institutions are employing cogni- arguments and recommendations, along with a tive computing for investment recommendations. In measure of the probability or con!dence level of any Japan, an engaging humanoid robot named Pepper— recommendation generated,” he says. who will be assisting customers at bank branches and retail outlets and providing companionship and care Unlike their science-!ction predecessors, cognitive in the home—will be powered with intelligence and machines are neither able to feel emotion nor are they face recognition from Watson. autonomous. They have the potential to augment our ability to understand—and act upon—complex Watson’s debut on Jeopardy was played as a contest of systems, such as the human genome. The success man versus machine—a machine designed to answer of cognitive computing will not be measured by a questions with knowable answers. But Watson’s computer’s ability to mimic humans. It will be mea- tremendous knowledge base is now being trained sured in more practical and essential ways, like return to answer complex questions and is able to present on investment, more satis!ed customers, new market extensively researched scenarios and probabilities opportunities and—above all—lives saved. in !elds such as oncology. The power of cognitive computing is its ability to illuminate what was We are in an age where we are not able to e"ciently previously invisible—patterns and insight from the or e#ectively utilize the volume of information that is unstructured data of sound, pictures and movement— produced in a single day across every single industry. allowing more-informed decisions about more- Many organizations are struggling to draw meaningful consequential matters. Watson’s contributions are now conclusions from the unstructured data they a matter of man plus machine. already have. Cognitive computing represents a giant leap forward in addressing this challenge. Its ability to Cognitive systems learn through experience, reason process a vast amount of information, learn from that with purpose and interact with humans naturally. information and provide conclusions is far beyond They represent a leap from the deterministic infor- that of any other technology available today. mation systems that preceded them, explains John E. 4 | RESILIENCY IN THE COGNITIVE ERA Watson’s Expanding Universe Watson began with a challenge over a decade ago: if a computer can beat a chess master in the wordless game of chess, would it be possible to build a system that could compete in a game that involved language? Watson was originally designed as a system to answer questions posed in natural language—a system capable of breaking down language into phrases, looking for statisti- cally related information and reasoning through possible answers. Over the past few years, Watson has developed into something much greater. Watson is now a cloud-based platform. The platform is available to developers who are finding ways to pull the cognitive power of Watson into their own organizations in new ways. There are over 80,000 programmers in more than 500 partner companies working with Watson. They have launched hundreds of cognitive applications in healthcare, retail, education, travel and other fields. Watson’s universe continues to expand. The platform now includes real- time data on weather as well as Twitter feeds and sensor data from a growing range of connected devices—all of which can be used to build business-relevant applications. Watson has also developed sight, beginning with the analysis of medical images. Watson started as an IBM initiative, but it is now a partner in medical research and practice, professional sports, insurance and many other industries. In the near future, Watson could be powering applications in any organization that would benefit from cognitive computing. COPYRIGHT © 2016 FORBES INSIGHTS | 5 This presents an opportunity for the resiliency pro- At the same time, cognitive capabilities have tre- fession—or anyone responsible for the continuous mendous potential for improving resiliency and operation of an enterprise. disaster recovery. What might Watson teach us about preparing for something as unpredictable as an earth- As cognitive capabilities become more indispensible, quake? Shirley Ann Jackson, president of Rensselaer continuous availability will matter even more than Polytechnic Institute and former chairman of the it does now. If cognitive capabilities can help save U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission in the Clinton a patient’s life, then the consequences of an outage Administration, suggested that Watson could be could mean a dangerous delay in treatment. An used to identify vulnerabilities, such as those at the enterprise that depends on a continuous $ow of Fukushima nuclear power plant in Japan, before there data to reach accurate results with a cognitive system is a meltdown. If Watson could help mitigate the might miss valuable insights or risk inaccurate fore- damage from an unavoidable disaster, imagine what casts if that data were disrupted. cognitive capabilities could do for the everyday challenges of ensuring resiliency. Proactive Resilience Business resiliency is the ability of an organization to anticipate, respond and adapt to sudden disruption as well as opportunity. As tolerance for downtime continues to decrease, the focus of resiliency is to ensure that businesses are able to continue operations, no matter what happens. With the ever-increasing reliance on technology, the impact of a failure of technology could be catastrophic and even life-threatening in some industries. The integration of analytical and cognitive capabilities can improve the way companies enable resilience—moving