Trillions of dollars’ worth of IT spend seemingly crippled by a global IT outage. What a wakeup call. The adage, “going back to the drawing board” couldn’t be more resounding now.
While businesses and institutions grapple with fixes to ensure these situations never happen again, here are 3 ways to outage-proof your IT infrastructure.
Hybrid IT is still an excellent deployment model. Whether you choose to go multi cloud, cloud + colocation, cloud + colocation + on premise or any variant, the saying “don’t put your eggs in one basket” illustrates just how businesses must look at their infrastructure. No matter how many 9’s there are in their promised reliability, it always pays to NOT rely on a single source. After all, if one opts for reliability of multiple IT infrastructure, the math increases.
Back up must also be hybrid & universal. Many used to associate back up as a duplicate of one’s data, infrastructure, systems or location. But nowadays, in the age of growing interoperability across multiple platforms in the software level, businesses must now look at deploying their business services using multiple application types/modes/providers. While this may be an interoperability nightmare, given the recent events in IT, it may now be a worthwhile cause to implement. Better go through the headache now than later.
Run downtime simulations to ascertain true RTO. Recovery Time Objective (RTO) is a measure on how short (or long) it would take for businesses to get up from outages. Have you experienced the irony of getting a UPS and only knowing that it is broken when it is supposed to kick in (but it somehow does not)? Now is the time to simulate an actual downtime and ascertain whether the RTO is aligned with your business expectations; business or mission critical applications cannot afford lengthy downtimes. Never rely on “stated” or “lab tested” RTO, the real-world RTO considers not just the application & hardware, but also the connectivity, environmentals, manpower and other connected services.
The lesson we all learned from recent unforeseen events is this: don’t just put your eggs in one basket, get another basket or two, and put some more eggs in the fridge for good measure. While IT outages are no laughing matter, now is the time to rethink your IT posture.
Digital Halo is the Philippines’ newest data center facility that houses colocation facilities as well as partner-driven solutions that can deliver hybrid cloud products. Its flagship MNL1 facility is the only data center in the east of Luzon, and is home for hyperscalers, enterprise and public sector clients as well as businesses who demand facilities that are not too near nor too far from the CBDs. For more information, email manila@digitalhalo.net or visit digitalhalo.net
