What is Cloud Resiliency?
Cloud resiliency is the ability of your cloud infrastructure to withstand and fully recover from disruptions – both unplanned and intentional. Technology and data have become more ingrained in how we communicate, travel, and shop. Cloud resiliency allows your business to provide uninterrupted service and access to your online applications so that customers and end users have a frictionless experience.
Cloud resiliency should be part of your overall business continuity plan. This plan guides the strategy and response of your business to unexpected failures. A disruption in service will prevent you from running your internal data intensive workloads, as well as your customer-facing applications.
In today’s digital age, you don’t want to be left behind because your cloud computing infrastructure is experiencing a glitch. You must have a disaster recovery plan in place to allow you to quickly switch over to a backup or redundant infrastructure to remain at the pace of today’s commerce.
The pandemic has brought on a new remote and hybrid workforce. Your team members are no longer confined to a local office and may be spread across multiple locations around the globe. With cloud resiliency, you can empower your team members to get the access to the data and applications they need to do their jobs.
A dispersed team does pose certain security risks to your data. Since your organization relies on continuous access to your cloud computing and storage infrastructure, cyber and phishing attacks can severely impact your core business operations.
Your organization can come to a screeching halt if they don’t have access to the data they need to do their jobs. Cloud resiliency allows you to overcome these malicious attacks by quickly failing over to mirror copies of your data, so that your business can keep running.
Sometimes, it’s Mother Nature that’s to blame for physical failures such as severe flooding and wildfires which can lead to extended power outages. Cloud resiliency ensures your data is protected and can be recovered, with no loss of integrity.
The advent of cloud computing has brought virtually unlimited scalability and flexibility to your organization. Cloud computing frees you up to take your business to the next level. Life in the cloud can be a dream. Except for when you suddenly lose access to your databases. Then, it can be a nightmare.
Cloud Resiliency FAQs
What is the difference between data resiliency and cloud resiliency?
Data resiliency is the ability of an organization to withstand disruptions and attacks to its data without interrupting normal operations. Data resiliency focuses on techniques such as data replication and backups to protect the integrity of your data.
Cloud resiliency takes it a step further with a systematic approach. Cloud resiliency focuses on the underlying infrastructure that houses your data. With cyber resiliency the focus is not just simply protecting your data but protecting your entire cloud infrastructure from both cyber and physical attacks.
How do you achieve cloud resiliency?
The only way to know how cloud resilient you really are, is to test your cloud infrastructure. And by testing, we mean pushing it to the limit. Just like a muscle, you must regularly test your cloud infrastructure to ensure it will withstand any attacks – both cyber and physical.
There are several best practices to achieve cloud resiliency. You need to perform stress testing of your storage systems, networking interfaces and underlying infrastructure. Does your performance drop off at peak loads? Your cloud platform should automatically perform load balancing to redirect high volume traffic and optimize your cloud utilization.
You should perform a full or partial failover as part of a stress test to uncover any unexpected glitches in your failover process. You also have to test for regional outages to confirm your cloud infrastructure will in fact automatically recover with no interruption in service.
These features come standard with Silk. With Silk, you get Always On Availability.
Is on-premises computing more resilient than the cloud?
While it is true that being on the cloud exposes you to cyber attacks, the truth is that cloud computing has come a long way. Security has vastly improved to the point where in most cases, cloud security has surpassed that of on-premises.
The flexibility of the cloud allows changes to be made on the spot to combat known and perceived threats. With on-premises computing, your IT teams are already stretched thin. Patches and other improvements take longer and leave your organization vulnerable in the interim.
By adopting the cloud, you unlock the growth potential of your company.
Achieve cloud resiliency and protect your mission critical workloads and critical data on the cloud by partnering with Silk today.