The keys to establishing resilient infrastructure

Infrastructure resilience is essential for any modern IT environment. Downtime is expensive. Beyond the stresses of day-to-day operations, you want to be confident that your IT systems will continue functioning during service disruptions, hardware failures, or natural disasters.

Establish a reliable resilient infrastructure to minimize downtime, improve customer trust, and protect your business’s revenue and reputation. Prepare your organization to adapt to changing demands and evolving technologies without significantly disrupting operations.

Four pillars of a resilient infrastructure

Creating a reliable, stable IT foundation starts with addressing organizational elements such as geographic distribution, component redundancy, dynamic scalability, and disaster recovery. Each characteristic is essential to ensuring your IT environment is reliable and performant both on a daily basis and especially when facing unexpected challenges.

Distributed

Spread workloads, applications, and data across multiple locations and systems to avoid central points of failure. While it may seem like added complexity, a distributed architecture ensures that individual outages are less likely to result in downtime. Distributing elements across regions and systems can mitigate the risks posed by localized outages. This approach also increases flexibility for workload management, allowing you to adjust resources dynamically.

Redundant

Build redundancy into your infrastructure to support continuous operations. Consider how duplicate servers, mirrored databases, or backup network routes can support your operations in case of hardware or software failures. Doubling up on equipment may seem expensive, but it can significantly reduce downtime and minimize the risk of data loss. With the cost of unplanned outages for enterprises nearing $25,000 per minute, redundant systems can quickly pay for themselves.

Scalable

Resilient infrastructures scale and adapt to meet increasing demands without compromising performance or availability. Scalability ensures that as traffic peaks or your business grows, your systems can handle the load without failing. In a scalable architecture, you can add more resources — such as servers, storage, and bandwidth — without disrupting operations.

Scalability is essential in today’s cloud-computing world, where the ability to respond to demand dynamically can make the difference between seamless operations and unplanned downtime.

Recoverable

No system is perfect. Failures can and will happen. A resilient infrastructure is recoverable and can quickly bounce back after an outage. Recoverability focuses on minimizing downtime and data loss by having comprehensive backup, disaster recovery, and business continuity plans in place.

Putting resilient processes in place

Beyond creating a solid technology foundation, resilience depends on well-crafted processes. Three core processes, in particular, contribute to maintaining smooth operations.

Event management

Effective event management is the first defense in ensuring IT resilience. IT event management involves monitoring all events that occur within the IT infrastructure. An “event” could be anything from a routine system update or an unusual spike in network traffic to a critical hardware failure. Create the ability for ITSM teams to proactively detect, identify, and resolve incidents before they become outages. With end-to-end observability of your IT stack, teams can detect anomalies and patterns and take action before incidents escalate.

Incident management

Even with robust event management processes in place, incidents will inevitably occur. Optimize incident management to minimize the impact of unexpected disruptions or system failures. Efficient processes ensure that your teams can systematically and quickly identify, diagnose, and resolve issues.

A solid incident management framework prioritizes quick resolution to restore services. The process typically follows a structured approach that includes incident detection, classification, investigation, resolution, and post-incident analysis. (Learn more about how AIOps accelerates these processes.)

Automation management

Automation is crucial to facilitate faster response, more consistency, and efficient resource use. Enable teams to scale operations, reduce errors, and improve efficiency by automating manual, routine tasks.

Many IT operations processes — from incident response to routine maintenance like software updates and security patching — are candidates for automation. Automating these processes ensures that critical functions execute consistently and accurately.

How AIOps helps build resilience

Beyond the quality of the architecture, you also need operational awareness. In traditional terms, this implies some form of event and incident management. In contemporary terms, those event and incident management processes may blur into a combination of DevOps and the CI/CD workflows on which DevOps teams depend. In either case, tracking your infrastructure health is paramount to successfully realizing the potential of the solutions it serves.

While observability certainly provides the raw materials for operational awareness, it stops short of providing enough context to respond effectively and efficiently when things go wrong. For this level of awareness, turn to AIOps platforms to weave all the threads together.

Context is everything. BigPanda provides responders with AI-informed root causes, recommended remedial actions, and historical comparisons to similar incidents in seconds. Giving teams the right insights when and where they need them helps recover services faster, protect revenue, and preserve your brand. Combining context with powerful analytics ensures your IT infrastructure remains reliable and resilient.

Any infrastructure solution is vulnerable to the vagaries of time. Architecture, telemetry, and operational processes evolve. Likewise, the platforms we depend on must be adaptable and support continuous improvement. BigPanda allows for a continuously evolving solution space.

Too often, organizations lack the information to make objective infrastructure adjustments. Comprehensive analytics service the need to maintain resilience over the long haul. You can use Unified Analytics to gain access to the empirical data you need to identify opportunities for improvement and highlight areas to apply automation to free up your teams’ valuable time.

Infrastructure resilience is a complex mix of considered construction, operational awareness, and continuous improvement. Without these, your services are at risk. Luckily, we have platforms that provide these capabilities and assure our reliability.

Next steps

AIOps has powerful capabilities to reduce IT noise, streamline incident management, and improve efficiency. Download the “Accelerate AIOps value” e-book to learn how you can achieve quick time to value with BigPanda and transform your IT operations.

Please visit us at Gartner IOCS 2024 to talk with our team about how BigPanda can help deliver reliable IT infrastructure.