ABSTRACT
Organisations must build digital resilience to effectively safeguard their business operations against environmental, economic, or socio-political disruptions. One approach involves adaptation – using Information Technology (IT) to design business operations that can withstand and recover from such disruptions. A second approach involves mitigation – using IT to advance environmental, social, or economic objectives that reduce the root causes and likelihood of future disruptions. However, both approaches to building digital resilience are challenging to implement. Our clinical Information Systems (IS) research article examines and reflects on how Beta Bank, an Australian fintech firm, developed an Everything-as-a-Service (EaaS) technology strategy and achieved digital resilience throughout its business operations. We explain how Beta Bank strategically leveraged EaaS to adapt to the significant disruptions caused by the Australian wildfire disaster and the global COVID pandemic of 2019–2021. We then unpack how Beta Bank further leveraged EaaS to enhance its digital resilience via a mitigation approach. Our work delineates a typology of four EaaS pathways for pursuing digital resilience, discusses the scholarly implications of EaaS as a future IS research area, and provides actionable managerial guidance through an EaaS roadmap, a strategic planning tool for those aiming to implement and benefit from this technology strategy.
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Disclosure statement
In accordance with Taylor & Francis policy and our ethical obligations as a research team, we report that Alexander Twigg and Graham Dickens have financial interest as shareholders in a company that may be affected by the research reported in the enclosed paper.
Supplementary material
Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/0960085X.2024.2435975
Notes
1. Tim and Leidner (Citation2023) differentiate between “ability”, “capability”, and “capacity” perspectives on digital resilience. We here explicitly adopt their “capacity” lens, which focuses on the limits of a given system’s resilience by directly taking the context (i.e., nature of the shocks encountered) and the intended outcome (i.e., recovery needs) into consideration.
2. We use “ecosystem” as a technical term to describe a collection of interdependent actors, specifically Beta Bank’s external IT service providers. For an extensive discussion of the ecosystem concept, we refer the reader to the vast body of ecosystem related research within the IS discipline; for example, R. Wang and Chebo (Citation2021) and Piccoli et al. (Citation2022) provide two recent contributions.
3. APRA is Australia’s prudential regulator of banks, insurance companies, and most superannuation funds and aims to protect Australian financial interests and create a stable, competitive, and efficient financial system. APRA collaborates closely with the Australian Treasury, the Reserve Bank of Australia, and the Australian Securities and Investments Commission.
4. The United Nations explains “modern slavery […] is used as an umbrella term covering practices such as forced labour, debt bondage, forced marriage, and human trafficking. Essentially, it refers to situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, deception, and/or abuse of power”.
5. For example, Microsoft states that its “Azure” services are “up to 98 percent more carbon efficient and up to 93 percent more energy efficient than a traditional enterprise datacenter” due to the use of renewable energy or advancing adiabatic cooling systems that do not need fresh water: https://datacenters.microsoft.com/globe/powering-sustainable-transformation] Accessed September 2024.
6. In Australia, the Financial Year (FY) runs from July to June. Hence, the FY 2022 includes the period of July 1, 2021 to June 30, 2022.
7. We refer the reader to Breidbach et al. (Citation2022) for a more extensive discussion of potential risks associated with EaaS.