Houston! We have an outage

Last year, the Aberdeen Group indicated that the cost of downtime had increased by 40 per cent in a three year period with businesses losing over £100,000 ($163,674) per hour in the last year alone. This comes as no surprise, particularly as we reflect on some of the high profile headlines reporting on companies falling victim to downtime of their critical applications. Take the widely reported IT outage that hit some of the UK’s biggest banks in December – the Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), NatWest and Ulster Bank were left without cash after a technical glitch hit the banks on what was considered to be the busiest day for online shopping last year – Cyber Monday.

RBS declared the glitch to be unrelated to the major outage in June 2012 that saw customers suffering payment and online banking problems for over a week. For this particular outage, RBS set aside £125m to cover the cost and compensate affected customers. But it’s not just about the financial loss and impact on operational efficiency that companies face in the event of system downtime – the impact on brand reputation and customer satisfaction can be equally as damaging if their critical applications fail to be “always on”.

An always-on environment has become a global requirement that touches every part of our lives. This is being driven by a number of factors – a profound increase in data, the proliferation of mobile devices, business continuity planning, and a global 24/7/365 economy are all contributing to this. The need to have instant access to everything has become the norm – whether its paying a gas bill online at 8pm while waiting for a train, withdrawing cash when the banks are closed, or downloading your favourite film in the middle of the night – the expectation is that no matter where in the world you are, you will be able to get what you want, when you want it.

So what happens when enterprises start looking to move their critical applications to the cloud?

The cloud – public, private or hybrid – has given organisations a new way to operate their business. Gartner predicts that 50 per cent of large enterprises will be engaged with cloud computing by 2016 as they come to realise the benefits. For enterprises, the move to cloud promises faster innovation, flexibility and cost efficiency. These benefits may not however be enough to compensate for the limitations – such as availability – which is fast becoming one of the top concerns keeping applications out of the cloud.

Today’s cloud infrastructures typically cannot guarantee the stringent levels of availability required by some of the more critical business applications. Clouds are typically designed knowingly with single points of failure in the infrastructure, with the expectation that availability will be built into the application. While this may be acceptable for new, native applications that are designed for the cloud, it is not a viable option for legacy applications that have been running in the most robust environments for years. Rewriting tried and tested applications to make them “cloud-ready” is not only a costly and time-consuming exercise – it requires specialist skills and involves a level of risk that is deterring organisations from taking the step.
It doesn’t have to be this way. An emerging category called Software Defined Availability (SDA) involves moving the capabilities of downtime prevention and recovery from hardware to software. In doing so, it becomes far less costly and complex, to migrate legacy applications to the cloud without compromising reliability. To date, enterprises have had to create silos to address the various tiers of availability, with applications requiring higher levels of availability running in separate environments. In this scenario applications considered “business critical” – requiring a fault tolerant environment 24/7/365 – would be placed in the appropriate availability zone or they would choose to forgo availability all together to avoid the cost. Neither is efficient as enterprises end up overpaying for availability they do not need or they risk downtime. Fact is, not all applications require the same level of availability and those that do need to be highly available don’t necessarily need to be one hundred percent of the time.

SDA provides the right level of availability at the right time, per workload, and helps companies take advantage of the elastic nature of the cloud. With SDA, enterprises can run a cloud environment with more control and flexibility and select the right level of availability on a by-need basis. This means that if an application is only deemed to be “business critical” during a certain period, that application can be moved from a fault tolerant to a highly available environment – or even a low cost general purpose environment with standard availability – during those periods when those fault tolerant levels of availability aren’t required.

The cloud is changing the way businesses operate. While not everyone is ready, or will even consider switching to a cloud environment, those who do decide to take the leap need to do so with resolution and avoid being held back by past concerns. SDA is a new approach to addressing availability in the cloud that will enable organisations to move their legacy applications with confidence. Above all, it promises to be the standard that enterprises expect when selecting a partner to help them make the move.