Organisations increasingly rely on digital services to deliver to clients. Any disruption to these services can lead to severe financial and reputational consequences - with many well publicised examples in the news.
Cloud platforms provide the potential for organisations to build highly resilient and recoverable digital services, often with lower costs than traditional on-premises setups. Flexibility, scalability, automated recovery and access to multiple geographically separated locations are features that have often been prohibitively expensive and time consuming to deploy on-prem.
This is an alluring prospect – enhanced resilience at less cost. But there’s danger in assuming that simply lifting and shifting existing services to the cloud will automatically deliver resilience benefits. In some cases services can even become less resilient. In reality, organisations must consciously consider resilience at every stage of their cloud journey – from planning and controlling their migration programme to maintaining and expanding over time.
Here are five things to consider in helping to realise the resilience benefits of the cloud for your organisation.
Both cloud provider and customer have responsibilities for achieving secure, reliable and resilient services. It’s important to be aware of this, particularly when choosing between PaaS, IaaS and SaaS services. Your cloud provider offers the toolsets necessary to maximise resilience, but it’s up to you (and the experts supporting your migration) to plan the resilience journey you want to go on, then design, build and maintain it.
Simply recreating the legacy environment for migrated services in the cloud rarely delivers optimum results and misses the opportunity to use its capabilities to the full. It’s always worth gaining a better understanding of what cloud can really do. Think about what you want to achieve – more availability? better recoverability? – and how this will benefit your business, by creating competitive advantage or reducing running costs, for example. Then build for this as opposed to just moving services as they are into the cloud.
Often, pressure to accelerate migration comes from higher up in the organisation, making it tempting to do so without taking advantage of everything cloud can offer. Likewise, delaying the development of resilience and recovery capabilities – or skipping on their testing and validation – is often seen as a way to speed up progress. In either case, this is short-sighted. Using this as a way to speed up migration or save money in the short term can lead to a lengthy period of risk exposure, particularly where migration programme teams are disbanded or other priorities take precedence. It is therefore best to educate all on what the benefits are and bring them on the journey.
Organisations’ IT landscapes are constantly evolving. Small changes over time as well as the introduction of new enterprise applications can have an impact on the ‘end to end’ service chains spanning upstream/downstream dependencies and underlying shared services. This can quite quickly erode highly resilient and recoverable services unless resilience continues to receive attention. Make sure you have a comprehensive testing programme in place to prove the capability, ensure effective controls are in place to consider resilience through both small and major changes and identify any legacy or emerging resilience gaps.
Getting positive buy-in from all levels within the organisation is critical. Resilience cannot simply be seen as a compliance burden or be treated as a side-of-desk or one-off activity. Getting it wrong can bring serious financial and reputational impacts. Getting it right however can give your organisation a competitive advantage in an ever competitive economic landscape, where the expectation is to provide services faster, cheaper and more reliably.
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