A Future of IT Resiliency Beyond Disaster Recovery
The recent extreme weather in Texas has caused serious disruptions, catching IT managers off-guard and posing yet another hurdle to businesses returning to normal. The ensuing crisis has pushed the need for more robust IT resiliency and better business continuity planning to the forefront. The stakes couldn’t be higher, as more of us are relying on the digital economy for vital goods and services.
A Changing Business Climate
Outages affecting global service delivery underscore the risks posed by increasingly complex multi-cloud and hybrid-cloud infrastructures. Despite predictions that this crisis could slow the great migration of IT companies and resources to Texas, the number of organizations relying on these environments – and the concentrated clusters of data centers that support them – will continue to grow.
The Limits of DR
In the past, IT resiliency was about business planning and redundancy. Systems were designed to maintain continuity with support from location-based disaster recovery processes or duplicates running in parallel with the in-use data environment. Using a mix of automated and manual processes, applications running on production systems were prioritized for recovery or rerouted based on business impact.
These resiliency configurations work when catastrophic events are predictable and IT environments are more simplistic. Power outages do not represent a major risk to the conventional infrastructure that is configured to quickly reroute workloads and is supported by a tenured IT team. But guaranteeing the right resources and personnel during a forced WFH situation and once-in-a-generation winter weather event is a scenario few would have planned for.
Emerging Challenges
Modern distributed multi-cloud environments and near-endless configurations of resource utilization further complicate the resiliency picture. Outages in various systems could mean more variable effects, impairing infrastructure and business functions in unpredictable ways. This makes backup and duplicate environments less reliable and harder to create. Additionally, more dispersed IT teams make continuity contingencies more difficult to implement, putting greater emphasis on automation and outsourced subject matter expertise.
How to Cope
Developing ways to combat uncertainty takes creativity in the areas of application integration, multi-cloud configurations, and middleware. At TxMQ, we’re finding new ways to apply our expertise, like using middleware and the proprietary Dev Ops Utility QConsole to leverage asynchronous messaging for better resilience. Factor in the limits of public cloud’s current one-size-fits-all portfolio and companies are relying on TxMQ to deliver customized solutions.
Rely on TxMQ
Major software providers have made supporting modern, hybrid environments a priority, and they count on partners like TxMQ to deliver on the specifics. TxMQ supports enterprise and mid-market organizations across North America on application infrastructure including high availability, system resiliency, and industry best practices for even the most complex hybrid environments. Contact TxMQ today to learn more about preparing for the unexpected.
