What it is and why it matters
Technology has become increasingly ingrained in our daily lives and has changed the way we consume services. The need to secure this technology is paramount. In the cloud, where information is accessible from anywhere, this need is even more urgent. Cloud resiliency is the process of predicting possible disruptions to a company’s technology service. It also involves planning for business continuity, as well as how technology systems will recover quickly and without data loss.
Cloud resiliency falls under the umbrella of business continuity, given its role in maintaining light and business continuity regardless of the scenario. We now live in a time when a pandemic has created the need for a remote workforce. It’s not going away, and employees need to be able to work securely from anywhere, a goal that cloud resiliency enables.
Speed without compromising safety
Business accessibility depends on maintaining security despite the threats of downtime and cybercrime. The modern cloud computing and consumption model is key to establishing the accessibility and flexibility needed to meet the most complex challenges. And it does this while meeting customer expectations so that everything is always available and performing.
Cloud skeptics often cite this accessibility as the reason for the lack of security, but that’s not the case. In fact, at layers 1-3, the cloud is often more secure than on-premises infrastructure. Cloud providers have more resources and time to focus on the security and operation of their infrastructure than many organizations have in-house. On-premises stores often struggle with lean IT departments and stagnant budgets. At Layers 4 through 7, there is an ever-growing network of vendors and delivery partners focused on helping your organization by design.
As the market continues to move away from technology teams managing their own data centers, they are relying on the cloud as their primary infrastructure provider. The COVID-19 pandemic has only accelerated this movement, as more and more seek to increase the financial and accounting predictability of the consumption model.
Cloud resiliency is a critical piece of this puzzle enabling a global shift in how companies plan for and respond to current and future customer demands.
What does cloud resiliency involve?
A resilient cloud posture depends on strategic alignment with business goals and unique threat vectors. Simply planning for known vulnerabilities is not enough. Organizations must also plan for unknown threats.
Cloud resilience is dynamic. It should be regularly exercised and hardened to provide a solid security posture. Technology teams test networking, storage capacity, and underlying systems, then perform full or partial failovers to mimic what would happen during an actual outage. When testing, it is essential to test a variety of scenarios, both likely and unlikely to impact your business. This range can include power failures, hardware failures, ransomware, and flooding, to name a few.
Once workloads move into the cloud, we now need to consider other failure modes, such as regional outages. How do you ensure that data remains protected and your systems are resilient in every unique scenario? All of this requires dedication, planning, intensive documentation, and an awareness of all probable and potential opportunities for failure.
For these reasons, many are turning to a plan that integrates disaster recovery as a service and backup as a service woven together for complementary resilience. Regardless of the extent of your cloud journey, whether you run entirely in the cloud or have a hybrid model, cloud resiliency requires constant iteration and a process to ensure the iteration is well documented.
Cloud or on-premises security
Cloud skeptics often cite security as their top concern for not moving to the cloud. However, they don’t realize that when they operate in the cloud, they have an entire organization – the cloud provider – dedicated solely to maintaining that cloud environment. Keeping the workloads in place and doing all the management yourself doesn’t have the same level of resources for security, regardless of the internal staff bench. With stagnant or slow-growing technology budgets, securing on-premises infrastructure is an increasingly undesirable approach to the flexibility of the cloud consumption model.
Maintaining rack and stack physical infrastructure, patches, physical security and more in the age of cloud consumption makes about as much sense as generating your own power when utilities are readily available. The primary goal of a cloud provider is to make its resources and services fully available and secure.
Also, with the cloud, users can make changes from anywhere and can make traceable and secure changes through automation and everything as code. The latest innovation is always at hand, rather than seeking a return on sunk costs first.
Each cloud journey is unique
Cloud resiliency starts with strategic alignment with your key business stakeholders, planning and executing with an architecture that supports true resiliency, and a hardened disaster recovery program as a disaster recovery plan. critical insurance, keeping your data safe. Your technical architecture is critical to the day-to-day operations of your organization, making the cloud not just a destination, but an ongoing journey of optimization.
About the Author
Dustin Milberg is a seasoned enterprise technology executive and currently CTO of Cloud Services at InterVision Systems LLC, a leading provider of strategic IT services and premier consulting partner in the AWS Partner Network. In this role, Milberg helps clients take a holistic approach to developing and delivering sustainable platforms while enabling technology organizations to optimize operations such as security, people, process, infrastructure, development and quality.