Lack of application resilience can bring an entire enterprise crashing down when processes essential to the business fail, stopping the flow of information. Application agility and resilience to ensure maximum uptime are essential for keeping organisations in business at all times.
While IT infrastructure such as data centres, storage and networks are important, these aspects play a supporting role to data and information. Information is the currency of business, enabling competitive differentiation, customer interaction and market share growth. Keeping this information flowing requires critical applications to be up and running when they are needed most. If an online retailer's back-end applications fail, for example, or a bank's transaction processing applications cease functioning, these organisations stand to lose significant revenue, reputation and even customers.
Having the right architecture in place is only a small piece of the puzzle, as while this is important to support applications, it is not the only element. Successful enterprise relies on the ability to access data from any storage on any platform anywhere and exactly when it is needed. The ability to transact and do business today relies on the ability to keep critical information flowing, which in turn requires agility and resiliency, particularly in the application stack. Agility here refers to the ability to migrate workloads across the infrastructure while resilience refers to the ability to keep the entire application running. If these aspects are not adequately addressed, problems can escalate very quickly until they prove catastrophic.
While virtualisation, convergence, cloud and storage vendors all work to build resilience into their platforms, this does not solve the challenge of application resilience and ensuring that business services remain online. The challenge here is that infrastructure availability does not necessarily mean application availability, in the same way that highly available storage does not necessarily mean that servers will keep running. In addition, protecting applications requires a high level of visibility and control of application architectures running across different platforms.
Despite these challenges, technology solutions are available to build agility and resilience into critical application architecture. Integrated, these solutions can help to ensure that regardless of the distributed nature of architecture across physical, virtual and cloud locations, critical applications are always on and operating at maximum capacity. In addition, these solutions can provide alerts when faults occur for prompt resolution, and can automatically recover to operational status, often even before anyone becomes aware of an issue.
Effective application resilience requires a number of different components. Firstly, a distributed storage layer ensures access to data when applications require it, regardless of storage mechanism or location. Secondly, a resilience layer ensures that the entire application stack, and the hardware on which it operates, is up and running, and finally an assurance layer proactively identifies and helps remediate gaps and vulnerabilities in the ever-changing configurations.
An effective solution will deliver resilience of the application stack to ensure that errors within both the physical and logical layers of applications can be quickly detected and corrected. In addition, organisations can lower their risk and test resilience at any time while ensuring that access to storage for critical applications is always available and running. In today's world, always on IT is not only about infrastructure, storage and compute, but about the critical applications upon which businesses are run. Ensuring those are always available is essential, and application resilience is, therefore, a vital business requirement.
