cancel
Showing results for 
Search instead for 
Did you mean: 

Zero downtime in hybrid multiclouds: What’s holding you back?

cusimano
Level 1
Employee

More businesses are moving their data, applications, and workloads to a hybrid, multicloud model that incorporates physical, virtual, and multiple cloud environments. As this trend grows, expectations for uptime in these environments also grows.

But achieving the “Holy Grail” of zero downtime still challenges IT teams.

Many organizations assume it’s the cloud service provider’s responsibility to prevent downtime and ensure business-critical applications are always available. This assumption is incorrect—and potentially costly.  

 For example, Google suffered a cloud outage on June 2, 2019, that disrupted services for up to four and a half hours, and a widespread Microsoft Office 365 outage in January 2019 affected users worldwide. Over one-third of organizations (36 percent) surveyed in the Veritas Truth in Cloud Report have experienced cloud service disruptions, and 73 percent of those incidents resulted in system downtime. Such outages reduce customer satisfaction, revenues, and profits.  

The risks of downtime are clear. But what prevents organizations from reaching zero downtime, and how can IT teams solve downtime problems?  

Enabling workload portability  

When moving workloads from on-premises to the cloud or vice versa, secure and rapid workload portability is key to reducing downtime. But IT teams face critical challenges to success.  

Many applications simply aren’t designed for modern portability. The complexity and dispersed nature of the underlying infrastructure poses another hurdle. For organizations migrating workloads, workload performance and uptime expectations must meet migration needs.   

In a rapidly changing environment, businesses require sufficient workload elasticity not only for today’s demands but also for unknown future demands. Enabling the complete, dynamic portability of applications can minimize downtime and ensure consistent performance across physical, virtual, and cloud environments.

Organizations need a solution that focuses on workloads to enable seamless movement across hybrid, multicloud environments. Solutions that provide complete, customized control of your entire data center migration plan, including the ability to manage all capabilities from a single app, let you rehearse and automate every aspect of the migration and identify potential problems.   

Delivering unified business resiliency

Achieving 100 percent uptime requires a plan for unified business resiliency. After all, if any one element of your hybrid, multicloud environment fails, the entire organization is in jeopardy.

But IT teams face many challenges in achieving resiliency. Network complexity makes it difficult to fully understand underlying infrastructure interdependencies and their potential effects; in hosted environments, for example, IT teams may not control the infrastructure. In addition, it’s often impossible to test a resiliency plan without disrupting business operations.  

Organizations with zero downtime tolerance need a standardized way to recover workloads in hybrid, mutlicloud infrastructures with a specified service-level agreement (SLA). Orchestrating business resiliency across the broadest possible set of infrastructures can help achieve near-zero downtime.  

To confirm the entire enterprise meets modern expectations for unified business resiliency, look for a provider that offers options ranging from near-zero downtime for key workloads and up to efficient, centralized backup and recovery. 

Out-of-the-box support for workloads and custom integration with both on-premises and off-premises underlying infrastructures can further enhance your organization’s resilience. A provider that offers the SLAs you require—whether that’s point-in-time, real-time, or snapshot data recovery—will keep your operations running smoothly in any situation. Finally, the ability to test your resiliency plan without disrupting operations will substantiate that your organization is truly recovery-ready.   

Building a resilient architecture  

Using a hybrid, multicloud setup presents new opportunities to increase the flexibility and scalability of your IT infrastructure as well as its resilience—provided you can ensure a resilient architecture for the most mission-critical applications. When you find a solution that offers high availability for mission-critical applications within the data center, to the cloud, in the cloud, and between clouds, you’ll be one step closer to making 100 percent uptime a reality.