In my last post, I focused on wildfire, one of several kinds of disruptive threats that can quickly bring down a business and the IT infrastructure on which it critically depends.
Each kind of disruptive threat (the top three are extreme weather events, natural disasters, and cyberattacks) requires its own particular preventive and protective responses, of course. Yet the goals are the same — to achieve true IT resilience.
Gotta have a plan
Certainly such IT resilience depends on the business continuity and disaster recovery planning you do before disruption occurs as well as what you do during and after an event. And I can’t overemphasize the importance of frequently testing your plan , especially after any changes to your IT infrastructure.
But as you do this planning, you need to understand what IT resilience means for your business.
An IT resilience strategy
A strategy built on principles of IT resilience combines continuous availability, backup, disaster recovery , workload mobility, and multi-cloud agility .
This is accomplished via an IT resilience platform designed around continuous data protection that also integrates orchestration/automation and analytics/control capabilities.
Continuous data protection, which includes state-of-the-art replication to speed recovery, protects applications with all their dependencies and enables pre-configuration of workflows for fast recovery without manual intervention.
Continuous journal-based recovery – for a site, an application, virtual machines, or individual files – is granular enough to date from only seconds ago, so you can rewind to any point in time with protection against logical failures as well as disasters.
Orchestration and automation capabilities support multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies and the major public cloud platforms, enabling…
- Faster management of workloads at scale with minimal manual intervention;
- Movement of workloads and data across heterogeneous environments, making migrations and consolidations easier; and
- Non-disruptive testing and audit compliance.
Analytics and control capabilities use tightly integrated, full-featured APIs and intelligent dashboards that access live and historical analytical data to provide complete visibility and ensure SLA compliance while you plan, optimize, and troubleshoot your IT resilience efforts across multi-site, multi-cloud environments.
Of IT resilience, interdependencies, and recovery times
As you adapt IT resilience principles and platforms to your business needs, pay attention to interdependencies that can impact recovery times. If your core IT infrastructure, networks, virtual machines, and databases must be recovered in an orchestrated sequence, your ability to recover one or more upstream applications can be dramatically affected.
Also, rather than setting up a single recovery time objective (RTO), develop ranges of recovery times — e.g., 0-8 hours for active-active failover, 2-24 hours for active-standby, 8-36 hours for active-passive.
And don’t hesitate to get expert IT resilience help. An experienced, vendor-neutral business continuity/disaster recovery services provider can help you develop and deploy a cost-effective IT resilience plan that can keep your business always-optimized.
