Understanding IT Resilience

While undergoing digital transformation, it may feel like there’s no end to things that can get in your way and cause business disruptions. The digital transformation journey is daunting but putting an effective IT strategy in place can give you peace of mind. At the core of that strategy is IT resilience.

Being IT resilient means being prepared for any type of disruption – planned or unplanned – to mitigate the risk of downtime so your focus remains on projects that drive transformation. It ensures business keeps moving forward, and, in fact, can accelerate transformation by letting you proactively see and adapt to changes to prevent disruption. 

A robust IT resilience strategy requires three components: continuous availability, workload mobility and multi-cloud agility. With these in place, you’ll withstand disruptions, achieve IT agility and evolve with confidence.

Here’s a closer look:

Continuous availability

The most important thing is delivering an ‘always-on’ customer experience – no matter what planned or unplanned changes happen in the infrastructure. Continuous availability keeps customers connected to their data and applications. Think of it as having backup power or a generator for your IT.

Backups have been an important part of any IT strategy for years. Copying data and applications to store offsite allows recovery of data no matter what happens to the production environment.

However, most of today’s technologies are inadequate. Periodic backups that only provide a snapshot in time are not compatible with demands for recovery point objectives (RPOs) of seconds and recovery time objectives (RTOs) of minutes. This coupled with the complexity that comes with legacy solutions, means that you should be integrating journal-based continuous data protection that’s accessible across multiple hypervisor, storage and cloud platforms.

Essentially, continuous availability means that whatever happens, be it a cyberattack, flood or planned outage, both you and your customers stay ‘on’ and protected against disruption.

Workload mobility

Workload mobility allows you to move applications and workloads while keeping them fully protected. This can mean anything from migrations, to M&A consolidations, or a new initiative being rolled out.

Although workload mobility is not a new concept, many IT practitioners are moving workloads around more regularly now due to the adoption of public cloud. With a myriad of public clouds and Cloud Service Providers on the market, it’s increasingly important that IT teams have easy, seamless and risk-free workload mobility to unlock on-premises environments that can extend data centers to the cloud.

Multi-Cloud, Hybrid Cloud agility

Fundamentally, creating a strategy that includes multi- and hybrid-cloud enables you to use cloud to accelerate business and take advantage of its benefits, such as the freedom to choose your own cloud and the ability to move to, from, and between clouds.

Many factors are driving adoption of multi-cloud strategies. Each cloud offers different services and features that may be better suited to specific applications. When you choose to adopt a multi-cloud strategy, you are able to pick the best levels of performance, response time and throughput for each application and tailor them to your needs.

Speed-to-market is a critical element of digital transformation. The cloud drives new efficiencies, helping you get applications to market quicker, without worrying about underlying infrastructure costs or maintenance.

Together, these three elements will ensure your organization can withstand any disruption. Combine these with analytics, control and a unified platform and your organization has the elements to drive innovation and true IT resilience.

Read more about how Zerto’s helping customers accelerate IT transformation and innovation.