In this post: Learn the definition of cloud’s geographic resiliency in this installment of ADAPTURE’s “Clearing Up the Cloud” series.
If you have been following our “Clearing Up the Cloud” series, then your cloud terms lexicon is beginning to fill up quite nicely. Cloud, however, has much more to offer—and so do our cloud experts—so don’t stop reading now.
Thus far, ADAPTURE has established clear-cut definitions for (potentially) ambiguous terms like cloud’s flexibility, agility, and scalability. If you are just now joining us, consider taking some time to review the earlier blogs in this series as many of these cloud concepts are cumulative, with each building upon the other.
Speaking of Cumulative…
In the last installment of this series, we provided a practical overview of the cloud’s geographic availability. As a quick recap, remember that cloud’s geographic availability relies on the expansive network of public cloud data centers that have been established across the globe. Because of its impressive reach, this global network enables companies to instantaneously spin up workloads in almost every conceivable region (whether a company simply needs better proximity to certain sites or client bases, or if they have international clients with country-specific compliance standards to meet). Public cloud’s expansive physical grid grants virtual mobility for both service and application.
So that’s availability, but what do we mean by cloud’s geographic resiliency?
Cloud Backup Solutions: The Geographic Reassurance of Cloud
The ADAPTURE cloud experts explain that cloud’s geographic resiliency “relies on the same physical construct that its geographic availability does. But this time, rather than an offensive tactic, cloud’s geographic resiliency enables companies to make defensive moves as well.” In short, resiliency offers companies cloud Disaster Recovery solutions and failover safeguards for their virtual assets.
For instance, let’s say you house a great majority of your cloud operations in US-East1 with AWS. You have chosen this data center region specifically because your main operations are in Richmond, Virginia, and—as we saw with cloud availability—it is more efficient to house your applications as close to your physical operations as possible. However, it’s been a rather hurricane-packed season, so let’s envision what would happen if a Category 5 storm barreled up the Eastern coast. What if US-East1 went down as a result? Your operations may predominantly be in Virginia, but you are most likely serving clients both inside and outside of your region; potentially across the nation, and even the globe. Although it is severely affecting your business, that hurricane isn’t disturbing your customers in Portland, Oregon, so they still fully expect their applications and paid-services to be provided without interruption.
How do you navigate this regional downtime?
To prepare for regional service outages like the one above, you will need to make plans for service continuity and failover; you will need to initiate cloud backup solutions in redundant locations. Namely, by replicating or backing up your operations in an entirely different region, like US-West1—a region that is far enough away from the original US-East2 to mitigate the chances of both regions failing at the same time—your company will experience little to no disruption of service when failures occur. If one data center goes down, then your crucial data and applications will immediately be spun up in a geographically safe region of your choosing. If you have taken the necessary precautions, this strategic redundancy of virtual assets enables fluid, uninterrupted service to your clientele, no matter the physical circumstances of one (or more) of your data centers.
Stay on the Cloud Defensive
It is important to understand that resiliency is a characteristic of cloud that you can take advantage of, but it is not automatically provisioned with every cloud contract.
Many companies make the mistake of assuming that their public cloud providers automatically build redundancy into their service offerings. This assumption, however, leaves their operations vulnerable to catastrophic downtime. As “it is not the responsibility of the cloud provider to architect redundancy for your assets,” our cloud experts recommend that, as you migrate to cloud, “you should build resiliency into your own company and applications from the very beginning.”
In short, to avoid downtime and interruption of services, stay on the cloud defensive and take full advantage of cloud’s geographic resiliency through the implementation of cloud backup solutions and inter-regional redundancy.
