Now that a hefty majority of enterprise systems, applications, and workloads are considered mission- or business-critical , discussions about business continuity and disaster recovery focus on IT resilience architectures employing multiple geographically-distributed data centers that use live application failover to prevent downtime.
These days, most enterprise systems, applications, and workloads are deemed mission- or business-critical . So, in addition to redundancy and high availability, discussions about business continuity and disaster recovery focus on IT resilience architectures employing multiple geographically-distributed data centers that use live application failover to prevent downtime.
As I mentioned in my last post, 68% of those in organizations committed to a multi-site resilience strategy – e.g., using Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS) , shifting IT infrastructure to a managed service provider environment , or deploying hybrid solutions – have confidence that their IT environments will perform as expected during unplanned downtime.
Whether it’s a complex corporate merger like the one Maria Gollnick of BloodSource has dealt with (see page 1 of our Strategic Advisor Newsletter) or, say, the shifting of an on-site infrastructure to a cloud environment, the challenges of merging/ consolidating IT infrastructures can be overwhelming.
Even modest consolidation involves networks, data centers, hardware, applications, clouds, backup plans, security policies, business and compliance processes, anticipating future needs and technologies, and more — all of which must be understood and then integrated into a new, efficient IT environment.
Regardless of any given IT infrastructure consolidation’s particulars, they all share these three imperatives, on which you should focus before beginning the actual work of merger/consolidation:
Despite all the (deserved) attention given cyberattacks, 82% of unplanned downtime can be attributed to application failures, hardware failures, or operational errors – at a time when 64% of business data and systems are considered either mission-critical or business-critical . No wonder 80% of organizations now demand a minimum of 99.99% availability – i.e., just 4.33 minutes of monthly unplanned downtime.
Your answer may depend on your job title. In one recent survey , 70% of C-level executives declared their firms “very prepared” – but fewer than half of the IT people at those same companies agreed.
Uh oh.
