Resiliency Meets New Complexities in a Hybrid World

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Most of us have grown accustomed to using our smartphones to deposit checks, and have never given a second thought to glancing at our wrists to learn the number of calories we just burned during that spin class.

We often take for granted the accessibility and practicality of the technology we use in our everyday lives, causing us to also overlook the nuts and bolts beneath the surface that frees us from having to question whether or not our devices are going to perform uninterrupted.

Today’s enterprise IT environments however, which increasingly blend public, private, or hybrid cloud platforms, as well as various data centers, applications, and end user devices, are forcing IT professionals to ask new questions about how to effectively manage business resiliency in the midst of this transformation.

In the “always-on” era, how do enterprises create resiliency strategies that seamlessly cater to IT complexity and interdependency across departments, applications, locations, facilities, and hybrid cloud environments, while still meeting their clients’ and customers’ uptime demands?

A daunting question to be sure, but one that can be answered with the help of some of the most effective IT solutions available. IBM’s latest strategy of Software Defined Resiliency is designed to reduce the difficulty of managing disaster recovery in a hybrid world and unite resiliency with the key areas of digital transformation.

Built on four core principles – improving the user experience, leveraging analytics to define strategy, implementing automation and orchestration into the hybrid cloud environment, and enabling ongoing testing and maintenance – this new disaster recovery experience is more equipped than ever before to avoid major disruptions.

New Software Defined Resiliency capabilities like IBM Cloud Resiliency Orchestration and IBM Cloud Resiliency Application & IT Discovery Services use data analytics to gain insight into prioritizing cross-organization resiliency needs, and employ automation to manage and monitor critical systems more efficiently. From day-to-day resiliency operations to allocating infrastructure during key events like data center migrations, these solutions are empowering IBM clients to meet complex hybrid cloud demands head-on.

UmbraGroup, an Italian supplier of aerospace equipment, has seen this new resiliency model succeed up close. With its new cloud-based disas­ter recovery environment, the company now has the ability to resume operations after an outage in a mat­ter of hours – not days or weeks – and has optimized its IT staffing resources to confront the company’s most pressing IT needs.

According to a study earlier this year from the Ponemon Institute, 60 percent of companies without a predefined Business Continuity Management plan said their company’s brand and reputation was affected because of a disruption, and the average cost of a data breach has risen 29 percent since 2013 to around $4 million.

The financial and reputational costs of business disruption can inflict lasting damage to a company that has not been able to sufficiently address newfound IT complexities. With the continued rise of hybrid cloud environments, CIOs and business leaders alike must be ready and willing to answer current complexity with an innovative approach like Software Defined Resiliency and treat comprehensive resiliency strategy as the foundation to set and meet future business objectives.