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Helping your clients toward IT resilience

IT resilience by Quest

Now that a hefty majority of enterprise systems, applications, and workloads are considered mission- or business-critical , discussions about business continuity and disaster recovery focus on IT resilience architectures employing multiple geographically-distributed data centers that use live application failover to prevent downtime.

However, your clients’ IT resilience architectures don’t just happen. They must be designed in accordance with multi-site resilience strategies unique to the needs of each clienthttps://www.questsys.com/data-center-services/network-operations-center.aspxs enterprise.

The cloud meets disaster recovery

Besides your clients’ own data centers, multi-site resilience strategies typically deploy cloud services (including shared service provider infrastructure ), managed services, and co-location . Of particular importance is Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS), which simplifies recovery operations by combining protection, orchestration, and automation.

Multi-site resilience strategies also favor synchronous replication to protect mission-critical systems as well as active-active data center configurations – meaning they use both their primary data centers and their recovery sites as production sites, each acting as a failover site for the other.

Hardly surprising, then, that IT execs whose enterprises use DRaaS or a managed service provider tend to feel better prepared to face down an event .

Shaping a multi-site resilience strategy

Yet it’s all too easy for your clients to find that they’ve defaulted into an informal, disorganized IT resilience architecture full of risky gaps and vulnerabilities – and plenty of expensive inefficiencies .

That’s why you need to be able to identify when your clients need to take top-down control of their multi-site resilience strategy. Such top-down control, which has become a business essential even for small organizations, involves many decisions related to business continuity and disaster recovery planning .

As you help your clients rationalize and hone their multi-site resilience strategies and the resulting IT resilience architectures, I urge you to pay particular attention to two issues:

  1. Conduct due diligence to find the right technology consultant to help you

    Developing effective, efficient multi-site resilience strategies and resilience architectures requires a special crossbreed of expertise – an ability to understand and translate your clients’ business goals and requirements into effective, efficient resilience processes, configurations, and solution capabilities.

    The right technology consultant can help you figure out which of your clients’ applications and workloads can and/or should be off-sited (or not), and which services (cloud, managed, co-lo) in which combinations are best suited to your clients’ performance, security, compliance, recovery, and cost requirements.

  2. Don’t let your clients neglect business continuity and disaster recovery planning, testing, and updating

    This remains a core business function that your clients can’t afford to ignore – but which is too often neglected as DRaaS and other resilience-friendly technologies are deployed.

    As your clients’ enterprises transform to thrive in our always-on world, they will need to regularly test and update their business continuity and disaster recovery plans. Help them by bringing in a trusted, experienced technology consultant so they do it right.

Meet the Author
Adam Burke is Quest's Vice President of Sales and Partnerships.
Contact Quest Today  ˄
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