How to Build a More Resilient Organization with Cloud
As we look back on the evolution of IT infrastructure, there are several factors driving its change: The desire to anticipate—and get ahead of—market and competitor-driven disruptions is one. Overcoming disasters and cyberattacks is among them as well; but also, ensuring workers and infrastructure have the capacity to innovative and optimize. “Resiliency” is intrinsic to future business success as a result.
Today, 68% of business leaders claim they would be more resilient now if they had invested in the right digital capabilities prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, CIO reports—one of the most substantial disruptions of the 21st century so far. That’s because cloud-based resiliency ensures business continuity under nearly any conditions, driven by the dynamic and responsive nature of the cloud.
But resiliency through cloud does more than mitigate risks—it’s a foundation that helps organizations become more agile and creative, driving business value. In fact, cloud-based operating models can “simultaneously improve resiliency, labor productivity, and time to market by 20% or more,” McKinsey reports. In these ways, organizations that utilize resilient cloud are prepared for just about anything.
What is Cloud-Based Resiliency?
Cloud-native infrastructure is becoming the backbone of nearly every industry today—from healthcare, to travel, to education, and beyond. It provides organizations with several operational advantages over those that continue to rely on on-premise systems.
In addition to performance benefits, cloud infrastructure can support organizational resilience through a disaster recovery as a service model (DRaaS), scalable infrastructure, and other protective and preventative measures to mitigate risks associated with those organizations’ most critical digital resources.
Specifically, resilience-enabling cloud replicates and disperses data resources and applications to multiple secure environments, ensuring data availability under any circumstances. But these resilient models drive their own business benefits as well, such as agility, scalability, and experimentation within these operational resources.
5 Steps to Enabling Resiliency within Your Organization
Despite all these benefits, few organizations have achieved their own comprehensive operating model featuring resilient cloud models. Leaders at these companies must drive that change, creating a single model that employees a combination of cloud-native capabilities. Here we review five clear steps organizational leaders can take to realize greater resilience through cloud infrastructure.
1. Start with your teams, as well as executives.
Although launching cloud initiatives must start with a top-down approach, executives should involve employees who will be affected by resilient cloud solutions from the start. Efforts should combine team-level priorities as well as overarching strategic goals to encourage adoption and ensure those efforts apply to all aspects of organizational needs. Approaching initiatives this way also helps build closeness between leadership and teams.
Executives must identify a purposeful initial step for resilient cloud as well. As Forbes describes, “DRaaS can act as a perfect first step into the cloud, empowering a full migration when cloud skeptics exist within the organization.” This is due in part to the ubiquity of cyberthreats and the widely accepted potential of cloud-native solutions for mitigating those risks.
2. Enable next-generation disaster recovery with resilient cloud.
Whether DRaaS represents your initial step into resilient cloud or not, it is essential. DRaaS is the next generation of disaster recovery capabilities and a clear winner for companies transitioning to resilient cloud infrastructure. “On-premises disaster recovery (DR) strategies will fade, with recovery bound for the cloud,” Forrester describes. “An additional 20% of enterprises will shift DR operations to the public cloud — and won’t look back.”
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Specifically, DRaaS protects digital assets on an ongoing basis, rather than relying on point-in-time backups like traditional DR solutions. DRaaS segregates operations from productivity environments, increasing IT teams’ visibility into key processes and enabling experimentation to improve real-world scenarios. Ongoing replication of digital operations ensures organizations enjoy the best possible business continuity as well.
3. Incorporate capabilities within a single operating model.
Organizations should leverage the competitive value and security cloud provides by unifying its capabilities within a single operating model from the start. This increases “awareness of system interactions [enabling] coordinated responses among outlined roles in various teams,” Will Grannis, Managing Director, CTO Office at Google describes.
IT teams must identify use cases for replication, then determine which legacy and hybrid systems can be transitioned to resilient cloud infrastructure. Once all infrastructure is on a resilient, cloud-native model, companies can achieve “a 60% reduction in change failure rate (the rate or frequency with which a system or service fails) while reducing labor spend by 30%,” as McKinsey describes in one use case.
4. Increase application agility so you can anticipate and respond to constant change.
Rather than continue with a futile effort to achieve “operational perfection,” IT leaders can leverage resilient cloud to develop more agile models. These capabilities evolve with new challenges, responding to the consistent nature of market, environment, and competitive change.
As CIO describes of resilient cloud, “you’ll be able to not only respond faster to unforeseeable changes, but also save money while doing it.” In this way, organizations can become better prepared for both micro- and macro-level disruptions, transforming their operations quickly as these problems arise.
5. Optimize applications on an ongoing basis.
In addition to minimizing costs, resilient cloud-native infrastructure provides “room” for organizations to perform more experimentation, launch new types of applications, and incorporate new operational models such as DevOps. “Rather than setting a fixed reliability as the calculation for contracts and practices, the focus must be on resiliency under any number of conditions,” as Grannis describes.
‘Digitally Reinventing’ the Organization with Resilient Cloud
The successful leaders of tomorrow acknowledge that the world is always changing. For example, nearly all business leaders (96%) are likely ‘digitally reinventing’ their organizations as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, CIO reports. Cloud-native resilience is critical to meeting these challenges. Consider cloud adoption as you look to optimize recovery, agility, and growth within your own organization.
Take the Next Step On Your Resilient Cloud Journey
Uvation can help you enhance cloud resiliency within your organization and evolve to meet quickly changing business challenges. Visit our Resilient Cloud service page to learn more, or start a conversation about resilient cloud options today.