Resilience in the cloud: It begins and ends with you
Regardless of how you store your data, in what way you scale, or which configuration you opt for — it’s your responsibility to ensure that your data is safe and secure.
In the cloud, things can go wrong. The unfortunate reality of cloud applications is that security, privacy and uptime are not always guaranteed. The sprawling nature of the infrastructure can often make it difficult for businesses to fully understand exactly where their data is stored and how it’s handled – leading to an array of concerns over protections, data privacy and compliance.
Planning for the unexpected is always a good idea
Too easily, things can go wrong with your application – whether it’s the application itself, the hosting provider, or another service your tool interacts with. This can be caused by anything from a DDoS attack to human error. However, you don’t have to lose any data or stop operating if you’re prepared. To ensure maximum uptime, you have to be prepared for anything, so you’ll need a disaster recovery plan, a process to test all your security measures and a way to report any errors. While every single intervention might not be necessary, the combination of them can go a long way to helping you bounce back from a disaster and recover data as quickly as possible.
Why building your resilience in the cloud should be second nature
Moving to the cloud should not be treated as a single jump, but rather a series of steps that lead to an optimal and safe long-term strategy. The reasons behind this are simple: cloud service providers are widely spread out across the globe and can provide a service that has optimal latency, reliability and performance, wherever your business might be located.
Atlassian, the maker of global collaboration and development tools, recently suffered a significant outage which took weeks to resolve, impacting hundreds of customers across the world and caused business owners to scramble so they could continue operating, in spite of this critical outage. It was a stark reminder that distributed cloud services don’t come with automatic resilience.
In today’s world, business resilience is synonymous with cloud resilience
As cloud computing becomes more and more popular, companies are looking for ways to build in reliability and security. While there are many strategies available for ensuring that you can continue working, even in the face of an outage, your choice in cloud provider will depend on how much you value data accessibility and uptime, as well as how much you’re willing to prioritise these.
With an ever-increasing reliance on cloud-based technologies, downtime is inevitable. Plan for these inevitable outages, and make sure you have an active and reactive management of your on-demand infrastructure, to ensure that your business is fully-functional 24/7. Sometimes you’ve just got to absorb downtime, especially when you can’t do anything about it or when the solution is too costly to justify getting back online immediately. Going forward, you can work on identifying weaknesses in your infrastructure and better understanding your configuration so you can develop a risk mitigation strategy that will allow you to stay afloat if, and when, things go wrong.
Resilience enabled through partnership
As you prepare to meet the requirements of your public cloud environment, it’s important to identify a cloud services partner who can help guide you. Strategic partnerships, innovative technology and being open about your needs all play an important role in sizing and defining workloads within a public cloud environment. Given the number of options in public cloud computing, it’s important to have a trusted partner who can explain them and answer your concerns, all while ensuring that resilience remains a top priority throughout.
