Enterprises are moving their IT infrastructure to the Cloud at an increasingly rapid pace but are struggling to make their Cloud operations resilient.
According to our recent report on the state of operational resilience in the Cloud, surveying C-Suite and IT and project leaders at major enterprises, 75% say that a lack of operational resilience undermines the benefits of moving to the Cloud in the first place. These enterprises are aware of the risks, searching for solutions, and increasing investment. Conversely, 73% of leaders say that they initially assumed that resilience would, to some degree, be automatic on the Cloud, which is a dangerous misperception that can lead to a high level of risk.
So how can Cutover help you adapt your resilience practices to the Cloud?
Cutover addresses your common Cloud resilience challenges
Adapting your resilience plans and governance from on-premises storage to the Cloud
Our survey found that 60% of enterprises struggle to adapt their continuity and resilience plans from on-premises storage to the Cloud. Enterprises can’t rely on legacy resilience approaches when operating in the Cloud and need to ensure that they have adequate operational resilience and business continuity plans in place before they even migrate.
Preparing for a Cloud migration is an opportunity to assess your resilience plans and processes and rework them for this new environment. When using Cutover, you can import existing plans onto one platform where they are centrally stored and can be easily edited, distributed, and executed. Or you can build new plans directly in the platform and leverage Cutover’s tailored resilience workspace to ensure you have all the right steps in place.
Cutover’s Collaborative Automation Cloud solution enables you to deliver on your Cloud migration strategies and ensure operational resilience by interconnecting your people, applications, and technology. The advantage of using Cutover over disparate ITSM solutions, spreadsheets, and automation tools is that you have a single source of execution for all the tasks directly within Cutover. Cutover notifies key people automatically when they need to take action and provides dashboard views so it is easy to keep an eye on progress all in one place.
Being proactive, not reactive towards Cloud resilience threats
56% of survey respondents said that their operational resilience strategy is too reactive and short term. It’s important to be able to react quickly in a crisis but what’s even better is being able to plan ahead for potential threats and get ahead of them.
A significant challenge with operational resilience is that a live incident requires an immediate response and the ability to call on teams in real time. A test, on the other hand, is usually conducted at a more measured and planned pace, so it may not be truly reflective of what would happen in a live recovery scenario.
To be fully prepared you need confidence that your disaster recovery tests simulate a real incident. Only by rehearsing the technology response with the people and processes involved can you ensure a successful recovery and avoid putting undue stress on the organization. With Cutover, you can ensure that you have a proven and integrated response in place across your teams, applications, and technologies for when something goes wrong.
Continuous awareness and real-time Cloud resilience monitoring
56% of our survey respondents cited continuous awareness and real-time monitoring as major challenges when operating in the Cloud. Operational resilience strategies in the Cloud require collaborative automation across your teams, applications, and technology. It requires a dedicated platform with targeted runbooks, transparent real-time visibility of plan execution, and regulatory audit logs. Cutover goes well beyond generic workflows or process management tools by enabling you to reduce both event planning and execution time with dynamic, automated collaborative runbooks. Furthermore, our real-time dashboards provide stakeholders with enhanced visibility through reporting, audit logs, and analytics capabilities.
End-to-end Cloud resilience focus
49% of respondents said that end-to-end focus encompassing evaluation, design, management, monitoring, reporting, and governance was an issue. Using Cutover, you can do all your planning and execution in one place where you can easily access, update, and control it. Only with Cutover can you seamlessly provide the required recovery capabilities, including hosting multi-team and technology recovery plans, performing planned or unplanned resilience testing, and recover from actual events, all with visibility into execution analytics (e.g. Recovery Time Objective, Recovery Time Actual, etc.) and audit logs.
Building a culture of resilience
43% of our survey respondents said that education for IT and Cloud resilience stakeholders was a major issue.
With shrinking IT teams and more complex application architectures, building resilience into your culture is more difficult than ever before. Educating your teams on the importance of IT resilience starts with helping them to understand all the various elements (people, applications, and technology) that drive successful IT resilience strategies and how all of these elements interact with each other.
Cutover allows you to eliminate manual processes during planning and execution, freeing your people up from focusing on manual tasks which could be subject to human error and allowing them to focus on higher-value activities which require skills such as decision making, collaboration, and creativity during a real event. Finally, building a successful culture requires full visibility and accountability. With Cutover, users can view progress and outcomes across all recovery tasks via live dashboards, helping them to understand their role and impact on the success of an actual recovery event.
Built with a foundational purpose of enabling humans and technology to collaborate, Cutover’s Collaborative Automation Cloud solution enables enterprises to ensure operational resilience and deliver on Cloud migration by combining the power of people, applications, and technology while ensuring regulatory compliance through dynamic automated runbook technology. Find out more about Cutover for operational resilience or see the platform in action.