Ensuring digital resilience in a hybrid world

The current pandemic has shown how digitalisation can make companies more resilient in a crisis. It has enabled them to navigate lockdowns and other restrictions by enabling collaboration, remote work, commerce and other economic activities to take place remotely.

But what makes “digital” itself resilient? What ensures that digital infrastructures and processes themselves do not break down?

To thrive, truly digitally organisations must modernise their IT infrastructure to become more autonomous, automated and agile, especially in the context of a hybrid world.

Embracing the hybrid approach has proven to be beneficial from the perspective of service delivery. A hybrid cloud accommodates the fact that not all applications, data and their supporting infrastructure and systems are equally business critical or valuable. It allows enterprises to run “the right workload for the right cloud platform” by placing applications and resources in the appropriate environment to meet business requirements such as regulatory compliance, data security, real-time access and an optimal user experience.

The hybrid approach is also highly beneficial from a business planning perspective.

According to a cloud usage survey by Denodo¹, 42% of businesses have adopted hybrid cloud configurations and, according to respondents, one of the key advantages of this was the ability to build resilience.

The need to build resilience has become even more pressing with the accelerated digital transformation that is taking place today.

Digitalisation exposes enterprises to more complex risks as data and systems become increasingly interconnected, not just within the organisation but also across entire ecosystems. Enterprises must ensure business continuity in the face of these risks.

Hybrid ensures that your eggs are not all sitting in one basket. It allows you to plan for sufficient redundancy such that if there is workload failure, you have viable failover options. Take data access for example. Storing backups of data in different physical locations, with different service providers, helps ensure that you have access to it in the event of disruption at any one site.

But the hybrid cloud itself presents potential risks to the enterprise. With applications and data spread across a fragmented, heterogenous environment, businesses may not have a clear view of where their digital assets reside, the application and data dependencies that link these assets, and the knock-on impact of any disruption in any node of the network.

An effective strategy will need to manage these complexities and interdependencies seamlessly and meet the uptime objectives of an always-on world. And in order to do this, it will have to be underpinned by a hybrid infrastructure that is autonomous, automated and agile.

Given the intricacies of the hybrid cloud environment, traditional manual methods of testing, monitoring, backup and recovery will not be able to provide the speed and responsiveness needed to create a truly digitally resilient organisation.

Manual processes are time consuming and costly, and many businesses do not have the manpower resources need to carry out all the processes involved. The challenge is exacerbated by the lack of specialised skills needed to handle the growing complexity of the cloud environment.

The solution to this is to leverage an autonomous infrastructure and institute automation as a core enabler. By automating repetitive tasks, businesses can optimise the process and improve the speed and accuracy of recovery. This increases the productivity of IT teams and the end-to-end efficiency, while improving the customer and employee experience.

Many businesses are starting to recognise this. According to a report by Forrester Research², 33% of hybrid cloud decision makers use automation at every phase of their resilience process; and usage is expected to double over the next two years.

These automation plans must dovetail with a holistic resilience strategy that parallels the business’s digital transformation - alongside other technologies, staffing considerations, and robust governance and management practices.

Businesses need to have a clear view of how the hybrid environment is going to grow. You must identify application and infrastructure dependencies, vulnerabilities, and risks and the impact that these could have on business continuity.

It is also important to understand how the strategy will operate within your business’s overall cloud plan. Cloud dynamics will shape your approach to backup and recovery, monitoring and event response, and inform business decisions on the level of automation and the skillsets needed to operate in a hybrid environment.

As you evaluate or re-evaluate your plans in the light of digital transformation, it is also important to make sure you are able to test these plans and update them to ensure that they are aligned with your business strategies and objectives. Because just like your business model and the infrastructure and applications that support it, flexibility in resilience planning will ensure that the business is ready for the next big disruption on the horizon.

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¹ Denodo, Global cloud survey 2020, March 20 2020.

² Forrester Research, The role of automation in managing resilience in hybrid multicloud, April 2020.