Application Resiliency vs. Infrastructure Resiliency

Software enabled application resiliency is now playing a significant and increasing role in bolstering applications availability and reliability across the enterprise, reducing risk to the business. No longer are clients solely reliant upon the stability provided by the electrical and mechanical systems in their data center. By utilizing new software techniques, enterprises are now able to deploy applications that span multiple instances from enterprise to co-location to cloud, that bolster the availability and reliability of their critical applications.

Hybrid Deployments Create Patchwork of Dependencies on Software Agility, Network Infrastructure and Cloud Partners 

While we’ve not yet seen any enterprises that rely solely upon software techniques to provide reliability, we have noted that many leaders are now complementing their data center reliability efforts with some form of software agility capabilities. And as more clients move some of their workloads to the cloud, they are beginning to utilize built-in features such as high-availability and reliability zones to augment their applications’ reliability beyond the capabilities of the individual sites themselves.

Additionally, these same clients are starting to replace or augment their requirement for risk management through disaster recovery with the high resiliency provided by availability zones from cloud providers. And bleeding-edge adopters are beginning to utilize advanced new work distribution technologies such as Google’s Cloud Spanner, which allows clients to scale globally with low latency while still preserving transactional consistency, by utilizing data that is automatically shared amongst several data centers to ensure integrity.

Keep in mind that as clients move applications and data to edge locations they can now purchase newly developed cloud services that have recently come on the market which utilize micro data centers connected in a grid formation, to create a virtualized data center that can span an entire city geography, with impressive overall performance and availability! This type of implementation requires highly specialized orchestration software, as well as a dedicated low latency fiber network that is very carefully designed, implemented and automated, to provide the high level of service required.

Cloud Providers Become the New Owners of Infrastructure Resiliency

Given all these advances in software related agility, it must be noted that all these cloud and edge providers themselves still continue to maintain highly reliable underlying electrical and mechanical foundations for their data center facilities. And since the connecting network now plays a much bigger and more critical role in overall application resiliency, it too requires the same level of focus on designed-in redundancy, reliability and fault tolerance, as that traditionally given to data center infrastructure design.  Risk management comes in so many forms to be sure.

So overall, there’s a big new world of options and approaches when it comes to applications resiliency design, with most enterprises still using a belt and suspenders approach of software and hardware to reduce risk and ensure resiliency and reliability. But with new cloud services providing increasingly more self-service capabilities, it’s becoming critically important for customers to clearly evaluate their modern digital business requirements which can then be used to map out a strategy that provides the highest level of availability and resiliency at a cost which is aligned with the business itself.

And with so much at stake, the risk management aspects of hybrid infrastructures should not be ignored just because they are hard to quantify. Your very business is at risk if you don’t. Remember, the measure of a great leader is one that is not afraid to ask for help. Ask for help if you need it!