Top Five IT Lessons – Number 1 : Resilience

The COVID Lockdown tested individuals, businesses and IT systems in unprecedented ways.  Many government officials and industry experts have estimated that 40% of businesses will not survive once government assistance ends.  All businesses require a combination of resilient people, systems, processes and finance to succeed.

Which is why resilience is in our top five list, topping the list at number one.  The key lesson being that resilience needs to be built into the fabric of an organisation, including its IT systems and management, before the need for resilience is apparent.

Being able to deliver an acceptable level of service in the face of significant change and disruption was in our opinion, the greatest lesson to be learned from COVID. IT resilience is about being prepared for any kind of disruption – planned or unplanned, so that any downtime is kept to a minimum.

No matter where you are in your digital transformation journey, you should be considering three important elements: continuous availability, workload mobility and multi-Cloud access.

CONTINUOUS AVAILABILITY is about keeping your organisation and your customers connected to data and applications.

Understand

• The functions that are part of normal business operations
• The minimum acceptable level of service
• The IT systems required to support these levels
• The recovery requirements – time, systems, capacity and performance

Reduce risk

• Plan to replace your hardware on a rolling cycle rather than waiting for it to fall apart
• Remove single points of failure with load balancing and redundant systems
• Keep maintenance and support agreements up to date with the service level you need
• Identify which systems need to be addressed as a priority

Notification

• Take advantage of available tooling to be alerted to potential problems before they become severe
• Ensure these notifications include all systems not just the most obvious ones
• Have an appropriate system to log, categorise, prioritise, diagnose, escalate, resolve, recover and report
• Augment your capabilities in areas where you don’t have sufficient competency or when doing so will give improvements in coverage, response times and reliability

Process

• Have detailed plans that include failover of systems to provide continued operations with no or an acceptable level of downtime
• Define the timeframe for restoration and the acceptable level of data loss caused by disruption or failure
• Conduct post-incident reviews to identify the root causes and implement preventative measures to remove or mitigate similar events
• Continue to review, test, improve and update to increase your ability to deliver service availability

It is also important to ask yourself these questions:

• What parts make sense to do inhouse and what can be outsourced to specialists?
• How can you draw on the experience of a large team of specialists across multiple disciplines and vendors to assist you?
• What is the real cost of a significant outage compared to the cost to mitigate against it and speed up restoration?

WORKLOAD MOBILITY was spotlighted by COVID as organisations struggled to keep operational with a remote workforce working across diverse locations, connectivity, technology and standards. This challenge is regularly faced in more mainstream scenarios like mergers and acquisitions; decommissioning data centres or the rolling out new initiatives. Organisations will need to continue moving applications and workloads to become accessible while remaining protected; most likely in greater volumes and shorter timeframes.

Moving traditional on-premise workloads to the cloud can require resizing, traditionally on-premise workloads resources are over-provisioned. In a PAYG cloud environment, these idle resources cost real money and workloads need to be tuned to run on just enough resources to reduce costs.

• How do you determine what should be moved and to where?
• What tools and experience do you need to bring the cost of moving to the cloud down?
• Do you need to provide remote access to applications and workloads that you can’t easily move?

MULTI-CLOUD ACCESS is about benefitting from the ability to move to, from and between different Cloud solutions including hybrids. Each offers different services and features that will better suit some applications better than others. Selecting the best performance, throughput, redundancy and price structure for each of your needs is now possible.

Scalability is much easier to achieve, allowing you to deploy solutions more quickly. You’re no longer constrained by Capex budget cycle, the rollout schedule and the maintenance required of the infrastructure itself. Sufficient care still needs to be given to the choices you make, how you maintain flexibility and commercial control

• How can you avoid “bill shock”?
• How do you protect your data and workloads from being taken hostage by a Cloud solution?
• What are the costs you would face from moving from one Cloud to another?