Resiliency Through the Cloud: Limiting Reputational Risk
The threat of business disruption is forever present, as is the harm these outages can do to a business and its reputation. In fact, according to the 2015 Cost of Data Breach Study: Impact of Business Continuity Management, the average cost incurred for each lost or stolen record containing sensitive and confidential information costs an organization about $154.
And that’s for each individual record. Consider the thousands of stolen documents and that number quickly adds up. But cost is only a portion of the downside. According to the report, 55 percent of companies that do not have a business continuity management plan said a data breach also had a material negative impact on reputation and brand.
A few years ago, organizations could feel satisfied with recovery time objectives of several hours. But as we clearly saw during some recent major technology breaches like those at Target and Sony, any outage can be reported on social media within minutes, causing additional damage to brand reputation and affecting an organization’s bottom line. Because availability has never been more critical, and because cloud computing can dramatically reduce recovery-time objectives, resiliency improvement is often the first, best use of cloud technologies.
More than ever, it is then imperative that companies create and maintain comprehensive, forward-looking IT datacenter strategies that enable them to optimize their capital and operational expenditures while satisfying the needs of their businesses and sustaining competitive advantage. The following considerations are key for success in the transformation of today’s datacenters to a more resilient model.
Resiliency through the Cloud
Cloud computing, with its promises of on-demand pricing, less IT overhead, and the ability to scale IT up and down quickly, has emerged as one of the hottest topics on every company’s agenda. The ability to establish resiliency within the IT and application layers of the cloud environment create interesting opportunities to potentially lower users’ expenditure. Specifically, the cost of creating cloud-enabled applications for virtual resiliency must be weighed against the cost of creating physical resiliency through redundant power and cooling infrastructure.
There are three cloud models that companies are adopting today: private cloud, public cloud, and hybrid cloud. Perhaps the most prevalent of these for mature companies is hybrid cloud, mixing public cloud with enterprise systems or private cloud. Today, many established companies are considering or implementing a hybrid cloud model to accommodate their complex requirements for processing, data, and security, while satisfying new models of engagement with their customers. The relationships between the hybrid cloud solution and the physical datacenter solution must be fully understood, documented, and incorporated into the IT datacenter strategy to ensure optimal design, operational efficiency, and lowest capital cost for the client.
Prefabricated Modular Datacenters for Agile Deployment
More and more users satisfy their need for increased agility, datacenter space, and higher power densities with a quick to deliver, install, and run anywhere, pre-fabricated modular datacenter. PMDC’s deliver a fully-configured modular datacenter for any type of IT application including private and hybrid cloud solutions – from compute, storage, and network hardware to power and cooling infrastructure – anywhere in the world.
These solutions can provide up to 20 percent lower capital expense and lower overall operational costs in a “pay-as-you-grow” solution. Modular datacenters are engineered as flexible, scalable datacenter solutions capable of supporting any IT workload and running in any environment. These solutions have been specially engineered to fully support cloud, analytics, mobile, social, and security applications and models, as well as legacy applications.
DCIM for Efficient Datacenter Management
The diverse and dynamic nature of the workloads that support CAMSS in the datacenter requires a new brand of monitoring and management. Datacenter Infrastructure Management tools assume this function, having become critical to optimizing delivery of services to the business through more efficient datacenter operations in the cloud. DCIM will be the catalyst for integration of the IT and facilities organizations, as well as the transformation of resiliency and capacity management in the datacenter.
Over time, users will use DCIM to ensure the highest levels of resiliency and efficiency at the lowest possible operational costs by migrating from manual and reactive operational practices to automated and proactive solutions driven by analytics.
Datacenter Ownership and Management
Today, there are many options regarding the ownership of the datacenters facilities themselves that must be considered including; corporate ownership of the IT datacenter, leasing a datacenter, co-location of the datacenter, and the overall management of the datacenter.
Some companies are now reconsidering if they want to continue to manage and own their datacenters in today’s fast changing environment. Many companies regarding these transformational decisions will make key decisions over the next few years regarding ownership and management of their datacenter.
IT Financial Model Supporting Change
A comprehensive financial model and the associated analysis of the business and technical requirements will provide an objective view of what the best datacenter options and priorities are for a company. The financial model must consider factors such as real estate costs, capital expenditures, and operating expenses, among others. A comprehensive IT financial model that is fully aligned with the business financials to support all transformations is absolutely essential.
Only by designing, developing, and implementing a business resiliency plan that will safeguard data, applications, and IT systems can organizations obtain the near-constant availability needed to conquer the challenges presented by today's threat landscape. With virtually every aspect of a business vulnerable to disruption, time-tested methodologies and industry-leading cloud capabilities can help maintain continuous business operations and improve overall resiliency.
About the Author:
Laurence Guihard-Joly is general manager of Resiliency Services for IBM. Follow her team on Twitter at: @ibmresiliency
