Given the growing challenges of modern business in keeping lights on so organizations can run at scale, it’s no surprise technology leaders too often lie awake at night thinking about potential disruptions to their business. With more businesses embracing the cloud than ever before to harness benefits of security, scalability, and speed; it is imperative to also reassess how you are going to strengthen your organization’s business continuity posture once in the cloud. Recent outages in the news only underscore this critical consideration.
Businesses have been turning to Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) to ensure smooth recovery from disruptions, and to keep harnessing the benefits of the cloud in times of an outage. Here are three quick tips to ensure the successful resiliency of your cloud strategy.
1. Establish Geographical Diversity
It may seem a simple concept, but if you tie all your production workloads to the same region or even the same power grid, you run the risk that if that region goes down, so too will your business. Traditional approaches to disaster recovery are no longer sufficient for the modern demands of business. Here’s why.
Having a geographically diverse suite of recovery options, such as load balanced cross region applications, or just simply using recovery technologies in a different area of the country, gives your organization independence from the risk of a regional disaster thereby minimizing the disruption to end users and organizational operations.
2. Tier Your Data and Workloads by Priority
By tiering where your critical information lives and when it should recover, you not only save on overall costs, but you also note to the recovery teams which datasets are most critical to bring back online and return to end users first, and so forth. Because the quality assurance aspects tend to be left out of recovery time objective (RTO) conversations, it’s important to be specific with company leadership around what their expectations are for recoverability and uptime following any given disruption type. And don’t forget to document everything in your DR runbook.
Here is a blog post about how to decide where to send your most crucial assets.
3. Establish a Multi-Cloud Strategy
Don’t put all your chips in one bag when it comes to your IP and most critical datasets. Having an alternate cloud environment or a hosted solution to failover your operations is key to a truly redundant solution. For example, if you run your production workloads in one cloud, then it might be good to have a failover option into another cloud or hosted environment for your DR solution, so that if one cloud goes down—as we’ve seen happen in the news before—then you have another environment to which you can send and run your operations. Here are a few tips for establishing a successful multi-cloud strategy.
Strategizing the Future of Resiliency
As we look to the future and what the digital landscape might ask of technology groups tasked with the continuity of their organizations, it’s key to prize flexibility above all other aspects of technology purchasing decisions. The cloud represents an unprecedented degree of flexibility compared to other options of the past, but even the cloud will evolve over the decades and new innovations may come to light that your business wants to harness. Keeping your business flexible to wind up and down operations in any given IT environment will be the secret sauce of success in the modern age.
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