Outages remind of the need for better IT resilience

Recent SA Health, Census and ASX failures are timely reminders that in-built resilience needs to be a key part of every IT strategy.

The South Australian Health department is still recovering from a nine-hour outage to its electronic patient administration system (EPAS) across three major Adelaide hospitals.

This happened just weeks after Australia’s share market failed to open on time. The ASX said the problem was due to “an issue with a component that allows ASX to manage individual stocks”.

Earlier this year, Telstra suffered ongoing challenges with several outages. While the company’s response was swift, what all these outages show is that no organisation — public or private — is immune to disasters or major disruptions.

Natural disasters such as the recent severe storms that battered South Australia are not always the cause of such outages — most data centre service interruptions are caused by hardware failures, software upgrades, cyber attacks and power outages.

The ASX downtime is a reminder to all technology departments just how swiftly key infrastructure and services can go offline — often incredibly costly to Australian organisations, from the loss of productivity to the loss of customer confidence.

For this reason, IT resiliency is gaining more traction as a vital way in which organisations can be prepared for, and quickly and easily recover from, a long list of potential daily disruptions to critical organisational IT services.

Preparation and application-protection-testing is key. For those IT departments revisiting and updating their IT resiliency, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity (BC) plans in the wake of the EPAS outage, the Census #fail or the ASX downtime, or those for whom building a DR strategy has moved to the top of the priority list, there are three top suggestions.

Architectural simplicity. By simplifying your architecture you reduce the moving parts and points of failure. Looking at solutions that can cover all data and applications critical to your company removes organisational and technological risk.

You can also reduce the amount of human effort required to keep it running. While the cost benefits associated with simplifying your architecture are almost reason enough to change your IT resiliency strategy, the true value comes from genuinely ensuring the organisation is protected when it needs it most.

Robust testing. Implementing a strategy is not enough. Regular testing should be an integral part of the DR strategy to ensure that the IT team is confident and prepared when a crisis hits. Automated recovery testing that doesn’t require additional infrastructure built into the product enables organisations to test and prove recovery right up to running applications. It also becomes a standard part of regular operations.

Enable the wider business. The shift to IT resiliency sees your DR strategy enable the wider business through the adoption of public and hybrid cloud. DR can reduce risk while also allowing for infrastructure abstraction. Applications can securely live and move between any storage platform, VMware and HyperV, and public cloud environments.

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