AptumA common mistake IT and business managers make is to equate IT resilience with disaster recovery. They believe if they have an effective disaster recovery strategy, their organization, including their data and infrastructure, is also IT resilient.
However, that simply isn’t the case in today’s business environment. People expect data and services to be available at any time. Even a relatively small service disruption – such as a power outage, server failure, or Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack – can damage a company’s reputation and impact the bottom line. That’s why true IT resilience requires managers to take a proactive approach to preventing breaches and other incidents before they cause a disruption.
Place the right workloads in the right places
So how does an organization boost its IT resilience? Modernizing your IT infrastructure and shifting some workloads to the cloud are good first steps. The cloud has some built-in resilience and security, but moving to a cloud environment means you need to ensure applications and workloads will function as expected, and data will always be available.
Building true IT resilience means you need to place the right workloads in the right place for the right reasons. Some workloads are ideal cloud candidates, while others are not. You also need to select the correct migration or modernization approach for each application and workload.
The key question to ask when increasing application resilience is, “How much downtime can the organization tolerate for each particular workload?” Once you benchmark your applications, understand your workload requirements, and set your objectives, you can place each workload in the right setting – whether that’s on-premises, colocated or in a public cloud.
Make data central to a holistic security approach
Data is at the foundation of any organization, but a company can’t be considered truly resilient if its data isn’t secure. In the past, when most data resided on-premises, companies relied on firewalls and intrusion prevention tools to protect their servers.
Today, with the rise of the cloud and mobility, the physical location of data is less relevant when it comes to security. Identity management is now a cornerstone of IT resilience — identifying each device and user, and controlling what users can do with data in different contexts.
However, organizations still need to know where their data persists. For example, your data may move from a public cloud into a colocation data center. To ensure it remains secure, you need centralized tools that allow you to follow the movement of that data through the different environments — on-premises, in the cloud or colocated in a data center.
Building IT resilience helps manage complexity
Hybrid IT environments can be complex. Building IT resilience into applications and workloads that span on-premises, hybrid cloud and colocation helps manage the complexity, but it requires knowledge and expertise that may lie outside the skillsets of internal IT teams. If that is the case, organizations can turn to partners with expertise in identifying and resolving resilience gaps, and providing guidance to meet business objectives.
For a more detailed look at how you can make your IT organization more resilient, download this informative eBook — IT Resilience and Data Protection in the Cloud.