All businesses, large and small, are focused on keeping their digital transformation engine running at speed. Not only that, investments in the IT environment for ensuring business continuity has also gained utmost importance in the recent past. The recent AWS outage has sparked caution among organizations with respect to single cloud strategies. This is further influencing smart infrastructure investments, which is estimated to grow by 40% in 2022.
Although most organizations are driven to capitalize on the hybrid cloud or multiple public clouds, resilience hasn’t been a key priority until lately. Many reasons are at play here, including but not limited to challenges in deploying multiple clouds for building applications. Managing different versions of applications on multiple clouds can bring huge inefficiencies, redundant activities, and complexities.
Mitigating Impacts on Infrastructure Resilience with Hybrid and Multi Cloud
According to Forrester, organizations can follow the basic strategy of Diversification, Mitigation, and Inquiry for building resilience of their cloud environment.
- Diversification – Building applications capable of being moved between different cloud environments helps in diversifying the risks to infrastructure. Replicating an entire application stack is not necessary for mitigating the risks of cloud vendor concentration. Resorting to a secondary CSP for disaster recovery or data backup in the case of outages or incidents can help in preventing impacts on the primary environment’s reliability.
- Mitigation – Where technology risks cannot be diversified, they can be mitigated by defining metrics of experience-level accord. This can be done for business-critical applications hosted on a single cloud environment
- Inquiry – There are limited options for building resilience of SaaS applications. However, the responsibility of inquiring about risk mitigation plans of CSP lies on the shoulder of organizations.
Automated Resilience for the Cloud
The infrastructure is automatically prevented from unforeseen incidents or threats at the network and system level. This stays true whether organizations are building applications or moving their workloads to a virtual private cloud. The VPC ensures automated protection against SPOF or single point of failure, as it embodies multiple AZs interconnected through high-speed connections, thereby maintaining business continuity.
Best Practices to Follow
Remediation of Risks
Greater volatility and complexities are evident when it comes to cloud deployments, a they involve multiple vendors, open architectures, and massive transaction volumes. Synchronizing legacy & cloud environments and managing interdependencies is indispensable for organizations. This has made it necessary to consider specific measures for building infrastructure resilience in the cloud environment. Some measures include building holistic strategies for multi-cloud management and automated provisioning, let alone driving innovation.
Downtime Assessment
Determining the impacts of downtime on workloads by studying all workloads is one of the first steps to ensure business continuity. Any downtime associated with user-facing applications directly affects the bottom line of the business and damage reputation. Hence, organizations must ensure that such applications are running 24/7. Moreover, end-of-support infrastructure and SPOF are common issues pertaining to legacy infrastructure and must be considered to evade downtime. Protecting legacy systems with updated patches for security assurance must also be one of the top priorities.
Strategy Implementation
Preparing for disasters beforehand helps mitigate negative impacts of downtime. For this, a disaster recovery plan is highly recommended as a proactive measure for security. Penetration testing and vulnerability assessment play a major role here. Such strategies ease eliminating security breaches.
To Sum Up
To factor in unplanned as well as planned downtime is a mandate for organizations to achieve true infrastructure resilience. The IT systems have the capability to transform themselves and ensure maintaining the crucial business processes and functions. This can be realized only by being future-proof.