Three principles for achieving hybrid resilience
Building a comprehensive resilience strategy in a hybrid world isn’t easy. But with the right planning and foresight, businesses can build end-to-end resilience.
Hybrid cloud solutions are the future. And for good reason. They offer businesses access to enterprise-level capability for significantly less. When the unique features of the private and public clouds are combined, they can provide businesses with improved flexibility and control over their resources.
The hybrid cloud also provides an excellent data protection platform. By keeping sensitive data on-site, or in a private cloud, businesses gain complete control over every aspect of their IT strategy.
Despite all the clear benefits, establishing data resilience with a hybrid cloud can seem like a daunting task. But it doesn’t need to be, especially if you have the right principles to begin with.
Be set up for success from day one
Supporting data resilience is the most important thing you can do to protect data, which is why businesses must commit to investing in that protection. It’s important to choose scalable, efficient architectures that can support all of the data used with your hybrid cloud configuration. Resilience is a marathon, not a sprint. The key is to stay focussed on long-term strategy, even as you construct your infrastructure in the present.
Data privacy is also an important issue for cloud storage users, and it’s one that you should carefully consider when choosing your premium partner. Encryption, inability to delete, and access controls are essential in hybrid environments, and they should be implemented from the start.
Put data protection first
You need to be smart about how you manage data in a hybrid cloud model. It’s as important to protect your business from potential regulatory violations as it is to prevent security breaches. Cybersecurity and cyber resilience are two separate things — the latter focusses on disaster recovery rather than attacks, and can help your business avoid hefty fines or a complete shutdown by helping you recover quickly.
If a business plans to use cloud storage, for example, the responsibility of data protection falls on both the business (in terms of preparation) and the service provider (for storage). It’s vital that you take this into consideration when selecting your public cloud service provider. They generally operate under a shared responsibility model, where certain responsibilities fall on the provider and on the user. It’s important to ensure, wherever your company uses the cloud, policies are in place to protect sensitive information.
Plan for the inevitable
Business owners know that technical failures happen, and power cuts are often caused by external factors. At its core, resilience is about creating a configuration that can move quickly to react to change. With a well-constructed hybrid strategy, businesses are able to transfer their systems from one location to another, ensuring that both users and businesses suffer minimal loss.
A robust backup and disaster recovery solution is the foundation of a successful business. If all your valuable and sensitive data isn’t safeguarded against damage or loss, then it’s useless. An effective business continuity solution means protecting data not just in oneother place, but every other place. Ideally, businesses should have a backup that’s hosted in multiple locations, so if anything happens in one, they won’t lose access to all of their information at once.
The new way of working, made resilient
When it comes to hybrid cloud adoption, there’s no denying that businesses understand the many benefits of leveraging a multi-cloud strategy. However, only those that adopt the broadest data protection capabilities, develop and follow strong data governance policies, and have a premium partner to guide them through it all, will be in a position to effectively manage and protect their data and workloads.
