ANSWER

Before we dive into what a digital immune system is, let’s consider what immunity means for a living organism.  Immunity refers to an organism’s ability to react,respond, and resist particular diseases, especially protecting against invading pathogens.  This often is accomplished through the development and deployment of countermeasures aka antibodies to fight the foreign intruders.

A Digital Immune System makes use of a variety of software engineering strategies, design, development, technologies, and data analytics to autonomously mitigate and respond to operational risks and security risks, in real time. 

Gartner, one of the leading technology research and consulting firms, has declared digital immune systems to be one of the strategic trends in software system design.  The firm has outlined a number of critical practices and technologies which are prerequisites for developing strong and effective digital immune systems:

• Observability

• AI-Augmented Testing

• Chaos Engineering

• Autoremediation

• Site Reliability Engineering (SRE)

• Software Supply Chain Security

• Continuous Validation

More on these tools and techniques will be covered in future Q&As.

Not surprisingly, the implementation of digital immune systems will make extensive use of data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning to enable the platform to automatically react to new attack scenarios and unexpected operational issues.