Boosting Business Resilience through Application Monitoring and Insight
Boosting Business Resilience through Application Monitoring and Insight
Sameer Malhotra serves as the co-founder and CEO of FortisTrue, having previously held high-level tech positions on Wall Street and possessing expertise in IT infrastructure and cybersecurity.
When discussing business continuity, people usually think of disaster recovery, backup procedures, and resilience planning. While these components are crucial, an aspect that is frequently overlooked is the value of application visibility. Without it, even the most thoroughly crafted business continuity plan could fall short of its goals.
A momentary lapse in continuity, even for a brief period, can translate to financial losses, tarnished reputations, and customer turnover. Although business continuity plans are indispensable, they can't reach their full potential unless they are continuously tested and verified, and this is where application visibility comes into play.
Any CIO understands that there's a significant gap between developing a plan and ensuring it will function when required. The true test of a continuity strategy lies in its execution, and success in execution requires real-time insight into your applications' behavior and condition.
Loopholes in Continuity Planning
While developing a continuity plan is crucial, there are specific challenges that can undermine its effectiveness:
1. The Restoration Process
The ability to backup data is essential, but the real challenge is restoring it. Without continuous verification, restore processes can easily fail when they are needed most. For example, if a backup script hasn't been audited lately, the restoration process could be delayed, causing delays in bringing systems back online.
2. Automated Failover and Software Updates
Continuity plans often rely on automated failover processes to switch operations from one location to a backup location in the event of an outage. However, software updates or infrastructure changes can silently disrupt these processes.
3. Manual Testing
Many organizations dedicate significant time each month to manually testing continuity plans to confirm they will work in a real-world scenario. Although valuable, this is a time-consuming and costly process.
Why Application Visibility is Important
The capacity to monitor software applications in real time offers insights into matters such as dependencies and behavioral patterns. This visibility is invaluable for identifying potential weaknesses before they become costly problems.
Achieving application visibility involves addressing challenges that can complicate continuity planning. First, applications are often composed of multiple interconnected services running across on-premises, cloud, and hybrid environments, making it difficult to get a comprehensive view of dependencies and behaviors. Centralized visibility tools that consolidate data from all environments can provide a single, unified view of dependencies and behaviors across the entire application landscape.
Here are some best practices for improving business continuity:
Continuous Monitoring of Dependencies
Enterprise applications often consist of interconnected services and processes, spanning on-premises and cloud environments. Use application visibility to track these dependencies, enabling proactive adjustments to the continuity plan when changes occur. For example, if one service frequently crashes or is slow, this insight helps adjust the failover strategy so that the impact on end users is minimized.
Automated Validation of Failover Processes
Manual testing can expose issues, but automated, visibility-driven validation ensures that failover processes are continuously checked. If there's an unexpected behavior in a component, visibility tools can flag this in real time, triggering a check or even an automated switch to the backup environment. This not only reduces costs associated with manual testing but also ensures continuity is maintained seamlessly.
Real-Time Alerts for Proactive Responses
Use application visibility to set up real-time alerts that notify your team of anomalies or suspicious behaviors. These alerts enable quick responses and even preemptive action before a minor issue escalates into a larger outage. If a new software patch causes unexpected behavior in a critical application, visibility tools can trigger alerts and allow the IT team to roll back the update.
Self-Healing Mechanisms
Incorporate automated responses to common issues discovered by application visibility. For example, if a service is unresponsive, configure a policy to restart the process automatically. This form of self-healing ensures minimal disruption and helps maintain continuity with minimal manual intervention.
Effective Resource Allocation
Continuity planning is resource-intensive; use application visibility to prioritize resources where they're most needed. By analyzing historical data on application behavior, CIOs can identify patterns and allocate resources to address recurring issues, ultimately reducing the need for frequent, resource-heavy testing.
Additionally, regular updates and software changes can introduce new risks or disrupt visibility, particularly when teams lack real-time insights into how these changes impact failover or restore processes. Use monitoring solutions that track changes immediately and alert the team when updates impact critical components, helping maintain a consistent view of application health.
Resource limitations are also a common obstacle, as manual testing for continuity can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, often stretching IT teams thin. Automate key validation processes, such as failover testing, to reduce the resource burden and ensure that continuity plans are always up to date without excessive manual intervention.
Despite these challenges, overcoming them is essential. Without full visibility, continuity plans can fail at critical moments, leaving organizations exposed to costly downtime and operational disruptions. By addressing these visibility challenges, CIOs can help ensure that continuity plans are reliable, actionable, and adaptive, ultimately strengthening resilience and safeguarding business operations in the face of unexpected events.
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To leverage the expertise of Sameer Malhotra further in enhancing business continuity strategies, one could consider inviting him as a guest speaker at an upcoming meeting of The Technology Council. His insights on IT infrastructure, cybersecurity, and application visibility would undeniably add value to the discussion.
In light of his experience on Wall Street and his role as the co-founder and CEO of FortisTrue, Sameer Malhotra would likely offer unique perspectives on how to effectively navigate loopholes in continuity planning and empower CIOs to accomplish their goals using the latest technology and best practices.