FINAL WORD
of public cloud options and hybrid cloud
strategies, it’s more important than
ever that IT teams have easy, seamless
and risk-free workload mobility and
agility. This can enable them to
unlock their on-premise environments
and extend their data centres to the
cloud. This is the key to many Digital
Transformation journeys as the cloud
provides cutting-edge features and
capabilities for organisations that don’t
want to be tied into just one vendor
along the way, or stuck with their data
in the wrong place if a platform doesn’t
work as intended.
Gijsbert Janssen
van Doorn, Tech
Evangelist at Zerto
One of the biggest hurdles companies
may face when considering Digital
Transformation is understanding how
to allocate resources between ‘keeping
the lights on’ and implementing a
new innovative technology. The most
efficient way of jumping this hurdle is by
ensuring that IT infrastructures are built
to be resilient – able to adapt to anything
from unexpected disruptions to planned
transformation initiatives. Essentially, an IT
resilience strategy enables organisations
to be prepared and to recover quickly from
any hiccup encountered. This is all while
simultaneously freeing up resources to
address the twists and turns that come with
overhauling digital strategy.
With this in mind, below are the three
components of IT resilience design that can
guarantee employees and customers never
feel a disruption:
1. An ‘always-on’ customer experience
In this day and age, regardless of industry,
it is critical that businesses deliver an
always-on customer experience – no
matter what planned or unplanned
changes are going on in the IT
infrastructure. At its core, continuous
availability is the approach to an IT system
that protects users against downtime by
keeping them connected to their data,
documents and business applications.
It is also essential, for an always-on
customer experience, it is also essential
that IT departments review current
backup strategies. Backups have been
an important part of the IT strategy
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for many years but unfortunately,
many of today’s technologies are now
inadequate for the job they need to
perform. For example, periodic backups
that only provide a snapshot in time
are not compatible with demands for a
recovery point objective of seconds and
a recovery time objective of minutes.
Tying this in with the complexity
that often comes with those legacy
solutions that require specific skillsets
to manage means organisations
should really be looking to integrate
the alternatives that offer incremental,
journal-based protection and can be
accessed across multiple hypervisor,
cloud and storage platforms.
At its core, continuous availability means
that whatever disrupts the organisation,
whether it be a cyberattack, a hurricane,
or even planned work to upgrade the IT,
both the company and its customers will
be completely protected.
2. Secure workload mobility
Workload mobility gives IT departments
the business confidence to move
applications and data workloads with ease
while remaining completely protected.
This can be anything from cloud platform
migrations to consolidations as a result of
mergers and acquisitions.
Although workload mobility is not a
new concept, many IT practitioners are
moving workloads around much more
regularly due to the rapid adoption of
the public cloud. Due to the multitude
3. Enable a multi-cloud strategy
Companies are increasingly using multi –
and hybrid-cloud strategies to accelerate
their business and properly take
advantage of the cloud. The benefits of
this approach include the freedom to
choose your own cloud and the ability to
move to, from and even between clouds
that typically require vendor lock-in.
The enterprise adoption of multi-cloud
strategies has many factors driving it.
After all, each cloud offers different
services and features that may be more
suited to specific applications than
others. Organisations that adopt a multi-
cloud strategy gain the ability to cherry-
pick the best levels of performance,
response time and throughput for each.
As part of IT modernisation and
transformation, a common use case is
moving disaster recovery and backup to
the cloud, while reducing physical data
centres. Speed-to-market is a critical
element of Digital Transformation and
the cloud can provide that by driving
new efficiencies which accelerate the
application life cycle without having to
worry about underlying infrastructure
costs or maintenance.
The three IT resilience elements work
hand-in-hand to ensure organisations
can withstand any kind of disruption.
Combining this with a unified platform
for implementing and leveraging new
technologies, companies will have the
right elements to spark innovation,
enhance business efficiency and
confidently overcome and conquer the
daunting task of Digital Transformation. n
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