It’s a warm fuzzy thought to think that when an event occurs it’s confined to a rudimentary issue and can be quickly identified and remediated. It’s even better to think that during the event the C-level executive outside of information systems had partitioned the budget in the previous year to achieve that resiliency and meet the requirements of the applications. The business bounces back and has zero issues or user errors and no one is the wiser as to what had occurred – that’s “IT resilience in the vacuum”.
True resiliency is not defined due to its ever evolving posture. Purchasing the best of the best is not the answer; you’re protected, sure, but at a monster sticker price with a silo approach. The question I asked is “How do we achieve the business unit’s resiliency within our budgetary confines while meeting and exceeding the operational requirements?” New products and iterations of existing solutions come out on an annual basis. After paralyses through analyses on products, philosophies, market direction and so on people have a tendency to stay status quo – “if it isn’t broke don’t fix it”. This climate has created a daisy chain of “the innovator’s dilemma” passed onto the users thus resulting slower adoption rates of technologies.
The DRaaS & IT Resiliency Methodology
For a complete IT resiliency strategy, and to ensure that employees and customers don’t ever feel a disruption, you need to look out for three main signs on the road: continuous availability, workload mobility and cloud agility.
Continuous Availability
The most important thing you can do is deliver an ‘always-on’ customer experience – no matter what planned or unplanned changes are going on in the infrastructure. At its core, continuous availability is the approach to an IT system that protects users against downtime by keeping customers connected to their documents, data, and business applications. Think of it as breakdown cover for your IT.
Essentially, continuous availability means that whatever pothole you hit, be it a cyberattack, flood or planned work to improve IT, both you and your customers are completely protected against any disruption, good or bad.
Workload Mobility
Workload mobility is the insurance, or the business confidence, that allows you to move applications and data workloads with ease, all while being completely protected. This can cover anything from migrations to consolidations as a result of mergers and acquisitions or new efficiencies being driven within your organization.
Although workload mobility is not a new concept, many IT practitioners are moving workloads around much more regularly due to the rapid adoption of public cloud. With the multitude of public cloud options and cloud service providers on the market, it’s more important than ever that IT teams have easy, seamless and risk-free workload mobility and agility in order to unlock their on-premises environments and extend their data centers to the cloud. This is also key to many digital transformation journeys as the cloud provides cutting edge features and capabilities for organisations that don’t want to be locked in to one vendor along the way.
Cloud Agility
Fundamentally, creating a strategy that includes multi- and hybrid-cloud enables you to leverage the cloud to help accelerate your business and properly take advantage of what the cloud offers. The benefits of this include the freedom to choose your own cloud, and the ability to move to, from, and even between clouds that have vendor lock-in.
As part of IT modernization and transformation, the common use case is moving disaster recovery and backup to the cloud, while reducing physical data centers. Speed-to-market is a critical element of digital transformation, and the cloud can provide that by driving new efficiencies and getting applications to market quicker, without having to worry about underlying infrastructure costs or maintenance.
All three of these elements working together ensure you can withstand any disruption and leverage any new technology seamlessly. Combine these with the likes of analytics, control and a unified platform for leveraging new technologies and your organization will have the elements to spark innovation and enhance business efficiency. Once you can become completely IT resilient you can confidently drive forward on your road to business transformation.
How Do I Get IT Resilient?
You need to find an MSP that provides both knowledge, experience, the proper technology and service that delivers a lot of value. CognoCloud is one of Canada’s leading DRaaS & Resiliency providers based in Toronto, ON. With over 15 years of experience, CognoCloud is a leading innovator in developing IT resilience to allow modern enterprises to fully leverage the benefits of the cloud whether public, private or hybrid.
DRaaS should provide customers with:
- Always-on infrastructure availability for migrations, DR testing, test/dev, etc.
- Secure data centers in Canada only
- Aggressive RPOs & RTOs for business critical apps
- A low monthly fee
DRaaS should have a very simple pricing model:
- A low per-VM licensing fee
- Any workloads/applications currently running in the infrastructure (no fees if apps are not live)
- Storage resources required (based per GB or per TB)
- Bandwidth if required
