Arm your organization against the enemies of zero downtime

[AlexRestrepo]

Striving for zero downtime in diverse IT environments can sometimes seem like a grueling quest. IT leaders pursuing this goal must battle daunting enemies, including ransomware, complexity, and unknowns.

How can each of these foes prevent you from achieving zero downtime? What risks do they present to your organization as a whole?

Most importantly, how can you slay the beasts?

Threats from ransomware, complexity, and unknowns

IT complexity is another common cause of downtime. While hybrid, multicloud environments offer many performance, agility, and cost-savings benefits, expanding beyond on-premise solutions adds numerous variables to an organization’s day-to-day data management and protection efforts. If you have more disparate types of systems within your organization, you can face greater difficulties maintaining them. This leads to more potential points of failure—and a greater risk of downtime.

Finally, unknowns such as economic crises, global pandemics, and shifting regulations can make zero downtime difficult to achieve. Although no one can fully prepare for the unknown, lack of planning can exacerbate negative outcomes when the unexpected hits. From pandemics that force teams to pivot to remote work, to recessions that reduce the IT staff available to keep systems running properly, the impact of unforeseen events often causes unnecessary downtime. 

The Hydra of hybrid multicloud environments

Like the multiheaded Hydra of mythology, the more diverse your IT infrastructure, the more difficult it becomes to manage several networks securely to achieve zero downtime.

Hybrid multicloud environments put much of an organization’s IT maintenance in the hands of public cloud providers. This offers greater simplicity, but it also reduces your control compared to on-premise systems and can make securing uptime even more challenging.

Understanding your data, where it resides, and who can access it is also key to operational resiliency, but complex IT deployments can hinder end-to-end visibility. Without clear insight into the interdependencies of your numerous systems, it’s difficult to detect, monitor, and remove threats that can lead to downtime.

Slay the downtime dragon

IT professionals must battle many threats, including ransomware, complexity, and unknown factors, as they strive for zero downtime. Solutions that protect data integrity; detect, monitor and remove threats; and enable automated, orchestrated recovery can guard against ransomware.

In complex IT environments, IT teams can help prevent downtime by gaining insights into data across infrastructures, being able to migrate data and applications multi-directionally, and consolidating functions that are critical to resiliency. Finally, while no organization can prepare for every possible unknown, making preparations based on industry best practices gives you confidence that your team can respond efficiently and effectively to any challenge.

A solution that provides protection, critical insights into your data, and certain high availability can equip your organization to fight today’s biggest IT threats. Thus armed, you can slay the dragon of downtime and emerge victorious over the forces that imperil your networks.