It ’ s hard to avoid the headlines detailing news of another outage . Not so long ago , Delta was hit with yet another major power failure that meant more than 280 flights had to be cancelled , and human error caused source-code start-up Gitlab a huge headache when an employee accidently deleted six hours ’ worth of data . Hardware failures , software upgrades , cyber attacks and forces of nature , among others , seem to be banding together to test the limits of IT and create one high profile service interruption after another . Digital downtime , as experienced by the companies mentioned above , can span anything from minutes to weeks , shutting down an entire IT infrastructure in the process . Not only is this financially damaging , but the repurcussions for brand reputation can be severe . More frustrating than the outages themselves , however , is the avoidability of it all – with robust business continuity / disaster recovery ( BC / DR ) solutions in place , businesses can avoid interruption altogether .
IT resiliency – the ability to maintain availability of applications and data – is becoming increasingly popular as a way organisations can be prepared for disastrous disruptions to critical IT . To accomplish IT resilience , a company needs to be able to respond to a potential outage with such speed that end users are not affected . Organisations that embrace the notion of IT resiliency ,
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More than 280 Delta flights had to be cancelled after a major power failure in August 2016 . |
which is a more proactive approach to BC / DR , focus on permanent availability rather than recovery after the fact through automated replication and recovery .
Step one : Streamline your IT systems
By simplifying IT architecture and reducing the moving parts , the points of failure are reduced too . Looking at solutions that can cover all data and applications critical to a company removes organisational and technological risk . By protecting data through hypervisor based replication , companies can streamline the business continuity process while reducing storage cost and increasing peace of mind .
Step two : Focus on automation
A clearly documented failover process is a must for disaster recovery to be successful , but an automated one is ideal for IT resilience . Manual failover
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processes have many steps and each manual step is an opportunity for a mistake to be made . If a business is executing a production failover , it is in crisis and that can cause people to panic , elevating the probability of human error . An automated failover ensures consistency and repeatability . Automation eliminates the risk of mistakes while ensuring fast , seamless and predictable recovery .
Step three : Harness the cloud
The shift to IT resiliency means that a company ’ s data is mobile and flexible , and nothing offers these advantages more than the cloud . As hybrid cloud becomes more popular – enabling organisations to move , translate and migrate virtual workloads with ease – a solution for continuous availability becomes ever more important . This proactive approach gives companies freedom and confidence in their ability to withstand any disruption while focusing on evolving IT budgets and business priorities .
It ’ s true that some things in life can ’ t be avoided . Service interruptions , however , are an exception to the rule . To avoid becoming a victim of another downtime disaster , companies should choose to opt for IT resilience with the support of continuous replication . This means that whatever crisis occurs , organisations can guarantee the availability of their data and , in turn , their service levels .
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30 | March 2017 |