The ability of your cloud infrastructure to withstand and fully recover from disruptions is known as cloud resiliency. Cloud resiliency prepares your cloud infrastructure for both unplanned and intentional attacks.

Attacks can be environmental such as damage to data centers from severe floods, high winds, and earthquakes. Attacks can also originate from the Internet in the form of email phishing attempts, ransomware, cyber-attacks, and other malicious actors.

Why is Cloud Resiliency Necessary?

Without cloud resiliency, your core business operations and applications remain susceptible to a variety of attacks, leading to application outages. You need to keep up with the pace of e-commerce by keeping your cloud infrastructure resilient. In this way, your end users and customers can continue to have a frictionless experience with your cloud-based applications.

What is Application Resiliency in the Cloud?

By adopting the cloud, you can run both your internal employee-facing applications, as well as your external customer-facing applications seamlessly. As your business grows, so does the number and complexity of transactions that occur across these applications. On the cloud, you will be able to scale your applications and add additional flexibility to match the growth in customer demand.

Application resiliency allows you to respond quickly to spikes in customer demand during peak seasons, without loss of functionality. Nothing like losing money during the shopping season because your applications can’t keep up with increased customer traffic. Application resiliency ensures your customers have a frictionless experience every time, no matter what time of the year it is.

The larger the customer base your applications serve, the more susceptible they become to targeted security attacks. When incorporated into your underlying cloud infrastructure, it adds a layer of protection to your applications and underlying databases. Application resiliency helps to mitigate against security breaches, data corruption or data loss from cyber-attacks.

Why is Application Resiliency Important?

Application resiliency keeps both your internal end users and external customers happy. Your employees and other internal end users rely on business applications to do their jobs. An internal application outage can have far-reaching impacts on the productivity of your teams.

In the same way, issues with customer-facing applications can leave customers frustrated and unhappy, sometimes never to return. Unexpected downtime in your applications can significantly impact your bottom line. Resiliency ensures your customers have a consistent and engaging experience each time they use your application. Happy customers interact with your application longer, ultimately boosting your bottom line.

For highly regulated industries, such as finance, government, and healthcare, maintaining data compliance is important. In order to keep important data on the cloud aligned to industry compliance standards, you might be required to show a high level of resiliency in case of outages.

Application resiliency also helps you maintain your reputation as a responsive company that is attuned to the needs of your customers. With the advent of social media, news unfolds in real time. You don’t want to be the latest company to be called out for having an application that isn’t working anymore. Keep your business out of the headlines for the wrong things, by keeping your applications resilient.

How to Improve Your Application Resiliency in the Cloud

At the core of application resiliency is time to recovery. Time to recovery is the amount of time that your applications can experience an outage before impacting your core business operations.

In this digital age, this time is getting shorter and shorter, if you want to remain competitive. There are many steps you can take to improve resiliency of applications as discussed below.

Steps for Improving Application Resiliency

Whether you’re looking to improve application resiliency to better appeal to customers or to meet industry compliance standards, there are a few ways you can improve application resiliency:

Backups

To improve application resiliency, you should perform frequent backups. These backups of your application and any associated meta data can be performed continuously or periodically depending on your level of risk. Meta data define how the application is built and will speed up the process of restoring a backup to a functioning application.

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

The code that an application is built on is typically managed with designated access and version control. The application infrastructure itself can be managed in a similar way. You are then able to easily test and deploy changes to the application infrastructure in a controlled way that immediately alerts you of any impacts to the application itself.

Resiliency Checks

You should keep a close eye on your entire application to anticipate outages and to ensure an automatic shift within your cloud infrastructure when portions of the application go down unexpectedly. There are various tools available that help you monitor various resiliency metrics such as IOPs, throughput, latency, and time to recovery.

OPS (I/O operations per second) measures how fast your cloud-based application can read and write to and from your database. Throughput determines how fast the data moves from your application to and from your underlying cloud database. Latency refers to the lag between executing an operation within your application and getting the desired results. Time to recovery is the amount of time you must get your application back up and running after an outage before impacting your core business operations.

Distributed resources

You can achieve high availability and low latency by deploying your applications to numerous locations within your cloud infrastructure, that is itself supported on a dispersed network. The applications that your mission-critical workloads run on need to limit interruptions to continuous service, a condition known as high availability.

Failover & Disaster Recovery

To achieve high availability, your application needs to be able to switch over from a failed node to a working node automatically, without loss of functionality. Proper and frequent testing of this automatic failover process better prepares your application for a true failure event.

Failover testing should be part of an overall disaster recovery plan. A robust disaster recovery plan allows you to back up your applications and underlying data continuously or periodically based on your risk level. Backups should be stored and maintained in multiple regions of a distributed cloud infrastructure to ensure high application resilience.

Third Party Management

Your in-house IT team is already overwhelmed with the daily operations of ensuring your application runs smoothly in the cloud. When it comes to testing, preparing backups, and monitoring application metrics, outsourcing these services may the best way to go.

Achieving Application Resiliency with Silk

Application resiliency can make your business stand out in the marketplace. Without application resiliency your business will suffer from slow response times and frequent outages. This will leave you with frustrated end users and customers, ultimately affecting both your productivity and bottom line.

With Silk, resiliency comes standard.

Since the public cloud is shared, cloud service providers typically throttle speeds for the benefit of all users. Even after a successful failover event to a backup copy, your applications may still be moving at a snail’s space. With Silk, you can expect the same level of performance on the cloud that you’re used to on-prem.

Disaster recovery techniques require the use of more cloud resources, known as virtual machines (VM). These additional resources enable you to automatically switch between servers and backups at a moment’s notice. These cloud resources are tied to compute power, storage capacity and performance. Managing such large VMs also comes at a price that may blow your monthly budget.

Silk breaks the link between these resources so that you can provision only the minimum number of cloud resources you need to achieve a robust disaster recovery system. By partnering with Silk, you only pay for what you need, when you need it.

The Silk Cloud DB Virtualization Platform is a virtualized layer that sits between your applications and the cloud. Silk is Always On, with no single point of failure. With Silk, you gain the confidence that your applications are always readily available.

Learn more about how to maintain application resiliency in the cloud by partnering with Silk today.

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Discover how the Silk Cloud DB Virtualization Platform can help you maintain application resiliency in the cloud.

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