Business resiliency in the cloud | The necessity of resiliency planning

Now more than ever, with COVID-19, resiliency planning should be among the top 3 business enterprise initiatives.

It's about time.  

Organizations, their teams, their consultants, and global service providers are finally coalescing around the concept that data storage, applications, and operational recovery should be centered in the cloud.

Finally, the global industry is waking up to the fact that you do not need to be physically tied or over-invested into IT infrastructure in order to be prepared for the effects of some type of impact and/or disaster on the organization.

Data storage in the cloud and data storage as a focus to drive a one-hour Service Level Agreement (SLA) to return of operations for the global industry is just common sense.

Take recovery out of the mundane and run of the mill "disaster recovery" and transform it into the critical business value investment - known as resiliency.

The future state of resiliency is the reduction of business impact from events by building a hierarchy of enterprise recovery and enterprise operations. Leveraging data in the cloud to the greatest degree possible is the foundation of this strategy.

It is no longer a "buy versus build" decision. It is a decision of operating from the status quo or for the organization to operate at the speeds, expectations, and dynamics of the markets they choose to compete in.

Even IBM is driving their resiliency services portfolio from the data of a recent Aberdeen Group report which highlights quantifying recovery by reducing risk through data in the cloud.

"It's about time"

We couldn't agree more.

That is why Enterprise Resiliency should be a Top 3 business investment for every organization.

The math is the math.

Approximately 80% of organizations are actively focused on data-storage, therefore the cloud makes perfect sense. 60% or so research disaster recovery. Notice the declining data focus on recovery versus resiliency. That is why operational contingency and best practices should drive a horizontally integrated set of enterprise operations, not just put it in the expense column of IT necessities.

Historically IT infrastructure has been invested in 3x deeper than was actually necessary to recover the organization because the focus was only on recovery, not resiliency. Resiliency means meeting the needs of the client, meeting the needs of the market, and meeting the needs of operating in a social media-driven world.

Today, resiliency planning is not only an investment in recovery, we believe it is essential in order to survive what we like to call the 'Rigidity Trap'.

The Rigidity Trap is how organizations, great though they are, become victims to their own success.

Because once enacted upon, an activity which generates success then gets embedded deep within the DNA of an organization and they continue to do the same thing over and over again, establishing it as the status quo. This represents one of the highest risks to organizations today.

They are in fact not nimble enough to respond and change to the market at the pace at which it changes, or nimble enough to operate in a world of ambiguity. These capabilities are equally and critically important to the data that is stored in the cloud, the recovery SLA of an hour which might be a lifetime in the cyber world is a critical value-based investment for the future success of any global organization.

Take a look at the Rigidity Trap.

We agree it's about time that the cloud and breaking the status quo becomes critical to every organization's future.