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Not Even Superman Can Prevent Cloud Outages

S_Deshpande
Level 3
Employee

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Up in the sky, look:  It’s a bird. It’s a plane. It’s Superman! Wait… what’s he doing? Is he saving the world from an evil foe? Is he fortifying the Cloud to prevent another seriously damaging business outage?  Not even Superman can do that.  Read on to learn more…

In 2013 Saugatuck Technology predicted that by 2017, 75% or more of enterprise new IT spend will be cloud-based or hybrid (1). Coming into 2016, this seems like a revelation that has already come true. Cloud has become the new mantra for IT spend, and we’re seeing businesses deploy more and more applications in the cloud. Private, public and hybrid clouds are top of mind for executive IT professionals in an attempt to reduce Opex and Capex spend and transform into lean, agile businesses.

Businesses profit from reduced hardware and software costs by taking advantage of hosted private clouds offered by cloud service and telecom providers, or public clouds such as Microsoft Azure, AWS and others. Many organizations adopt these clouds for data backups or as a disaster recovery target for their business applications. In fact, IDG stated in 2012 that business continuity is the number 1 driving benefit for the cloud (2). A growing number of organizations also use the cloud as the primary location to run their production systems, while some chose a hybrid approach.

It’s a no brainer that a business continuity or IT resiliency plan is essential to maintaining normal business uptime. Proactive approaches include downtime risk monitoring and mitigation, as well as application and data recovery across sites, or to the cloud. The concept of IT resiliency is simple to understand when your business owns its own primary data center and you implement a business continuity failover plan to a secondary data center or the cloud. But what if you are a business who outsources your entire production IT operation to a service provider or infrastructure provider? Do you still require protection against business crippling downtime?   The answer is a resounding yes. In this type of scenario where you no longer handle day-to-day operations yourself, you lack the control and visibility into your IT posture and your business readiness in the case of a failure. This is tricky, because if your service or infrastructure provider hasn’t made sufficient provisions to recover your business operations in the case of an outage scenario, you may be faced with loss of revenue, decrease in brand recognition, or sometimes even exasperated customers that want their flights to be on time.


What determines the future success of your business is undoubtedly your IT resiliency plan or lack thereof. If you are considering the service provider or infrastructure-as-service route, it would be prudent to understand resiliency safeguards your vendor has in place before you sign any contracts. Learn how disaster recovery as a service and other IT business continuity solutions from Veritas can help strengthen your business against unwanted downtime as you adopt the cloud, and let Superman concentrate on tackling the bad guys  

 

1 "Winning in a Boundary-free World, The Changing Shape of Today's Cloud ISV," Saugatuck Technology, May 2013

2 “2012 Cloud Computing Key Trends and Future Effects,” IDG Enterprise, January 2012.