Building resiliency in hybrid cloud computing environments could be simpler than you think.
Modern IT operations are undergoing upheaval, brought on by a perfect storm of internal and external forces. Is resiliency in danger in this environment or could it actually be stronger than ever?
While traditional IT services once ran solely from central data centers designed for client/server architectures or mainframes, many IT departments are now turning to hybrid cloud— a blend of traditional and cloud services—for greater agility and flexibility to meet changing business requirements. These valuable resources also provide reliable platforms for running emerging technologies, such as cognitive computing, sophisticated analytics and a new generation of mobile applications.
The technology researcher IDC predicts that more than 80% of IT organizations will commit to hybrid architectures by 2017.
With hybrid cloud architectures as a foundation, enterprise workloads can originate from a wide range of sources, including traditional data centers, private clouds, public clouds, SaaS applications and hybrid clouds. The result: organizations run workloads in optimal places, and at the most economical cost, while enabling the IT staff to focus more on innovation to support the business. But the uncontrolled growth of cloud services is creating new challenges for IT leaders. These multi-sourced environments can become difficult to integrate, manage and secure, and many IT organizations find they’re spending far more time and resources maintaining the infrastructure and far less time innovating modern services for the business.
Simplifying Business Continuity
To expand resiliency beyond keeping servers and applications up and running to include all physical and virtual layers of the enterprise, IT leaders must think more broadly, ensuring that the entire organization is fully protected across all business processes. Resiliency as a Service combines proven disaster-recovery and backup technologies and methodologies with the new approaches needed to deliver end-to-end resiliency.
Resiliency as a Service can benefit enterprises in a number of important ways:
- Reduces the complexity of managing disaster recovery across hybrid environments as clients are shi!ing portions of workloads to cloud
- Elevates end-to-end resiliency to the business process level— protecting the end-to-end business process dependencies across applications, data and infrastructure components
- Enables organizations to more accurately assess their tolerance for risk to devise the right resiliency strategy
- Determines the business criticality of all corporate resources, from both a business and IT perspective
- Proactively addresses impending failures to avoid, rather than limit, damage to the business
- Advanced analytics can run trend reports against replicated data so it provides value even when it’s not needed in an emergency
Schedule a consultation today to learn more about resiliency and a service offered by Flagship Solutions Group.
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Business Resiliency
Business resiliency is is unsung hero of an organization. In the absence of robust business continuity management (BCM) and communications, disruptions can expose your organization to considerable risk. While many organizations have deployed BCM plans, they can often be ineffective and too rudimentary to keep disasters away.With the IBM Disaster Recovery as a Service offering, your organization can implement an integrated BCM strategy that leverages advanced technologies and a robust testing program and learn to master disaster recovery.  
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