Resiliency is the practice of planning for potential disruptions of technology service at a business, taking into consideration the complete threat landscape of our modern era. A resiliency plan can either be self-managed or managed by a third party, and it docks into an organization’s business continuity plan.
Indeed, a business continuity plan must have at its core a strategy to ensure ongoing operations despite technology disruptions at the office site. In this modern landscape of remote workforces, employees must have the ability to work from anywhere, yet securely. Cloud resiliency empowers this very goal.
Security that Emphasizes Speed
A business must be accessible to both its employees and customers, all while remaining secure against threats of cybercrime. This means that a modernized computing model is essential. The answer often lies in embracing the cloud to achieve this data resiliency.
Many businesses already have cloud-first strategies, having realized the direction of the marketplace away from managing on-premises datacenters in favor of a more ubiquitous way of serving customers. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has created an increased urgency, and thus, organizations have accelerated their journeys to the cloud to meet the challenges of a fast-paced post-pandemic world.
What Cloud Resiliency Entails
Resiliency in cloud computing relies upon strategic alignment and awareness of a fast-evolving threat landscape. You shouldn’t plan for the threats of yesterday, but for today and tomorrow.
An example of resiliency might be testing a Disaster Recovery program to be sure of its recoverability. Here, technology teams might test storage resiliency or network resilience against unexpected scenarios such as power outages, loss of connectivity, or hardware failure. How do you ensure data is protected against potential loss? Resiliency, especially cloud resiliency, aims to assure business units that data will be protected and recoverable.
But cloud resiliency doesn’t stop there. The growing prevalence of cyber-attacks in the form of phishing and ransomware have placed increased pressure on technology departments to plan for possible attacks on their business. Therefore, many organizations have been looking to Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) paired with Backup as a Service (BaaS) to assure stakeholders of recoverability following such an attack.
But not all businesses have embraced the cloud in entirety yet, opting for a hybrid model for the time being. If this is the case for your business, the issues of application resilience in hybrid cloud can seem vague. No matter the extent of cloud usage within a business, data resiliency solutions demand constant iteration to be successful. This means testing on a regular schedule and documenting all changes in your organization’s DR runbook.
Why the Cloud Is More Secure Than On-Prem
Many organizations wary of going to the cloud have misplaced concerns about security when operating in that model. In fact, the odds of an on-premises infrastructure being less secure are much higher than in a cloud environment because upkeep demands far more ongoing manual work to refresh hardware and update applications in that type of environment. This puts a lot of strain on an IT team.
While an on-prem infrastructure may have a team of personnel managing it—all while also juggling other roles within a business—a cloud provider has one goal: to keep the cloud running and optimized. And this singular focus benefits customers. The cloud emphasizes a dynamic environment where upgrades and updates can be performed quickly, all with the click of a button rather than the need to perform physical hardware replacements. This means that the latest version of an application or new server innovation will always be within reach and quick to implement.
Strategizing Your Journey to the Cloud
Data resiliency in cloud computing demands strategic alignment with the rest of your business, and a robust disaster recovery program. Attention to all aspects of your technology architecture, indeed, is paramount in this modern age that depends so much upon being available to customers.
As you know, the cloud is not simply a destination, but a journey of optimization after migration. If your business is considering how best to migrate and operate in the cloud while keeping costs low, reach out to an InterVision expert here to get advice.
