5 Key Strategies to Boost IT Resiliency

IT instability and outages are no longer a concern. Every minute of downtime for a system costs approximately $9,000. Since the world is becoming increasingly digital, system failures have become a hazard to reputation, which can impact the price of shares, sales numbers, and the overall potential for growth.

These tragic events highlight the necessity for companies to consider IT resilience, or the ability to handle technological disruption. A company that is IT-resilient is known for its capacity to quickly handle and recover from interruptions while maintaining a reasonable quality of service even in the face of failure or downtime.

 The majority of the time, the reason for an outage can be avoided by proactive monitoring and control.

While we know that it requires a culture change to maintain and enhance the resilience of IT as a top priority, we advise businesses to adopt a holistic approach comprising five easy-to-integrate key strategies that can affect both business and IT results.

5 Strategies for Improving the Resilience of your IT System in your Business

The complexity of IT processes and systems is increasing, and the number of outages is also growing. These issues have made businesses massively invest in making their IT systems more resilient. After working with several companies regarding their IT systems' resilience, we have a few methods that have been tested over time and discovered to work most effectively for the IT Resiliency Strategy.

• Set up an atmosphere that can control demand-related emergencies

Whether driven by external forces or internal ones, demand may go up without warning. For instance, if you take GameStop as an example of IT resilience, In 2021, the company's stock price soared, and investors came in to claim their shares. Unfortunately, this led to the resources being so limited that customers could not access their accounts, leading to the site being shut down.

• Use automation

Automation is now a standard feature of current IT architecture; however, only a handful of companies know its significance in constructing it into an IT-resilient system. This is apparent in network automation, which aids in a streamlined merger and acquisition process and reduces manual effort and the chance of human mistakes.

• Add redundancy to the data centre

Another approach to developing an IT resilience strategy is to look for potential problems that could cause outages and then employ redundancy as a countermeasure. Companies that protect themselves from the possibility of hard disc failure by mirroring discs or using failover clustering to guard against failure at the node level are good examples of this.

• Distance-based clustering, as well as a code for erasure

For an IT resilience plan to work, businesses must operate normally in the event of a failure. This can be achieved in two ways:

• Distance clustering: The concept behind this method is to extend failover clusters by placing cluster nodes in a distant data center. So even if the data centre fails to failover, the applications running on the cluster are automatically transferred to the facility located remotely.
• Erasure coding: This mode to boost IT resilience is based on stripping the data across multiple clouds or data centers. It assists in ensuring that the sensitive data remains secure, so that when a company stores data on cloud storage, the erasure coding portion of the IT resilience strategies is structuring the data so that no cloud provider has a complete copy.

• Live backup and recovery in real-time

Recovery and backup continue to be integral aspects of resilience in technology, particularly in an "always-on" IT environment. Continuous backups usually work with changed block tracking, in which whenever a storage block is altered or created, it is targeted to be backed up. This way, data is backed up regularly instead of as a one-time backup at non-peak times.

How can you Improve the Resilience of IT? Tips and Techniques

In the wake of data breaches and network outages, it is clear that the IT system has moved a few steps away from finding the best way to improve IT resilience. However, while we've studied the three IT resilience practises that are best practices, implementing them within the company is an entirely different game.

At PerfectionGeeks, we are well-known for keeping "build IT resilience" as the primary goal of each data-heavy app we develop, so if a product or business owner comes to us for assistance in creating a resilient IT ecosystem, here are the suggestions we provide.

Concentrate on the highest probabilities first

Make a checklist of daily activities that could impact the most important applications. For instance, what happens after the SAN is not working or is in a state of non-recovery? What is the strategy for regaining the lost fibre connection?

The answers to these questions can bring process roadblocks to the surface and help businesses comprehend the consequences of these events. In addition, it helps them establish a solid IT resilience strategy.

Consider building IT resilience holistically

In assessing your IT system's resilience, you should focus not only on the IT resources or digital channels for customers but also on those that support business. For instance, the development team may not be able to work without a plan for code repositories and digital workspace applications, contrary to when integration with Salesforce does not work. Likewise, the sales team cannot follow up on leads; they cannot follow up on leads they receive.

Be aware of your IT environment and dependencies

To boost IT resilience, it is important to understand the dependencies around application-to-application, application-to-services, and application-to-infrastructure. Understanding the connections between the upstream and downstream requires fully comprehending and communicating the implications to stakeholders. 

Although these are just surface-level guidelines, there are numerous small things that companies must take care of as part of their regular activities to make their IT systems more robust. But, one important thing to be aware of is that it will require an all-hands approach. Something only possible in a flat culture where resources and data are not separated.

At PerfectionGeeks, we collaborate with clients to create their IT resilience strategy; our first step is requesting that clients be part of all teams and comprehend their personal IT dependencies. Only after you understand what systems and tools are being used to support user journeys can you begin to build a resilient system.

Get in touch with our IT specialists to develop an effective IT resilience plan.