Accept it or not: cloud resilience is your responsibility. Whether it’s public, private, or hybrid, it’s on you.
Too many companies believe they don’t need to focus on resilience once they’re in the cloud. They think a platform like Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud protects them from outages — right until the moment their applications go down.
You can architect around cloud outages if you want
At some point, your application or data store will go down. Whether by an act of God, malicious intent, human error, or an unexpectedly successful product launch, you must be prepared. Resilience strategies in the public cloud are required to maintain 100% uptime, should that be your goal.
But cloud resilience is not automatic. When you’re in any cloud (public, private, hybrid), resilience means embracing the inevitability of outages and being able to answer three difficult questions:
- What is the impact on my business if a system goes down?
- Can my systems be down for 4 hours? For 8 hours? For 24 hours?
- What are my recovery point objectives (RPOs) and recovery time objectives (RTOs)? Do I even have them?
Until you are aligned on the answers across your organization, efforts to increase resilience are premature and, quite honestly, moot.
Resiliency in cloud computing is more than a 1-step process
When you move your data and applications to a single availability zone in a single cloud region, you’ve accomplished two things:
- You’ve made the move to the cloud. For that, you deserve honest congratulations. Migration is only the first step, but it’s a major step in the modernization of any organization.
- You’ve put it upon yourself and your team to ensure your environment is resilient. Public cloud resilience depends upon not one service in one availability zone in one region, but multiple availability zones in multiple geographic regions for all critical data and workloads.
The Amazon outage on December 7, 2021 was a serious reminder that resilience is not a default feature of the cloud. Resilience is on your business, and the importance of resilient public cloud environments has never been higher. Whether you were a Fortune 500 firm scrambling to get business done, or simply waiting for your Ring doorbell to chime with the arrival of more holiday packages, you likely found yourself impacted by this event.
Business resilience is cloud resilience
Myriad strategies and architectures exist to build cloud resilience. The solution that’s best for your organization, customers, partners, and end-users will be based upon your risk tolerance for the financial, brand, and operational impact of outages and your ability to absorb the increased cost and complexity of multi-region environments.
No business wants to be down, especially during the holiday season. However, sometimes the right strategy is to absorb the outage if the cost and complexity of architecting around it are not feasible for your business.
Regardless of where you land on the RTO and RPO spectrums, public cloud resilience is now one of the top two strategic requirements for 2022. The other? Cost optimization. Just when you are ready to focus on controlling cloud costs, the need for “more cloud” rears its head.
As you approach these requirements, sometimes it helps to identify a trusted advisor to help facilitate the conversation. Deft would be happy to help you through your strategy process, whether you choose to work with our team in achieving your public cloud goals or not.
