Hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes may be pretty rare (thank goodness) but day-to-day threats can destroy data and ruin a business. That’s why it is critical for all businesses to have a current, active disaster recovery (DR) plan. But don’t panic. If you’ve completed a cloud migration project, perhaps it was your dress rehearsal and your chance to see how well prepared you really are.
IT today is an environment of perpetual change. Driven by pressures of digital business transformation, IT must keep pace to support new, innovative services and manage a mixture of systems, applications, and infrastructure that must operate seamlessly together. To do so, the IT landscape has evolved to include virtualization, SDDC, cloud, SaaS technologies, converged infrastructure and more.
This increased complexity across IT makes it difficult to understand where specific applications are housed, and to identify all the systems and services that are relied upon to assure consistent, uninterrupted delivery of business services.
Today’s rapid pace of change opens organizations up to more risk which must be managed - risk of disruption, risk of data breach, and risk of compliance violations. Any change made in your IT environment, no matter how trivial, cannot be done without considering how the change will impact business users. If you swap out hardware with another vendor, you still need to maintain your end-to-end resiliency target for all applications and services that rely on that hardware. If you move a portion of your workload to the cloud, you have the same challenge.
To manage and mitigate these high-stake risks and ensure resilience in IT and business operations, companies must have access to aggregate, accurate, cross-silo information from across the enterprise, as well as business requirements for the availability and security of applications. In their recently released Market Guide for IT Resilience Orchestration (ITRO) Automation, Gartner defined nine basic critical capabilities that are essential for building resilience and improving IT service availability, recovery, and integrity through the orchestration, sequencing, and automation of underlying management workflows.
- Server operations failover and failback
- Production application-specific operations failover and failback
- Production database operations failover and failback
- Production workload failover and failback
- Workload onboarding into public cloud
- Software and data dependency discovery and mapping
- Critical path analysis of recovery and continuity workflows
- Production data consistency and integrity assurance
- WAN throughput and latency optimization
What do you need to ensure your IT infrastructure will withstand a disaster or any kind of disruption, planned or unplanned?
How able are you to adapt to the inevitable changes that come at an ever-increasing rate in today’s dynamic business environment?
A reading of the Gartner guide and a reflection on your last data center or hybrid cloud migration may tell you if you are resilient and ready for center stage.
