Disaster Avoidance vs. Black SwansThe Rise of Real-time Infrastructure Replication as a Service

2

First, the Bad NewsBuilding and managing an IT infrastructure is a complex work that is perpetually in progress. It is relentlessly stress-tested by a continuum of disruptive technologies, system upgrades, mounting operational complexities and a torrent of rapidly scaling data.

As a result, today’s IT professionals are being asked to cover infrastructural and operational territory that continues to expand. For most, the attitude is “Bring it on!” After all, infrastructure complexity is a reality of the profession.

Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.

Risk management research shows that there are threats that are outside of our expectations and almost impossible to predict. There are anomalies that are generally understood and anticipated, but the latest focus in risk analysis points to the hidden risks of high impact, low probability disasters — unpredictable Black Swan events. Their unexpected nature makes them highly dangerous threats to IT infrastructures and professional careers.

Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute, Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term “Black Swan” to describe unforeseen occurrences plotted on a bell curve which has thicker tails on

each end. The theory being that more mass in the tails of a probability distribution implies a greater probability for extreme events occurrences.

As rare but catastrophic outliers, Black Swan events typically trigger a domino effect that impacts other systems and infrastructures, often with unpredictable follow-on effects. The 2015 shutdown of the New York Stock Exchange and the subsequent crash of The Wall Street Journal website serving as classic examples.

Large enterprises like those named above may be able to weather a Black Swan event, albeit with a significant hit to their reputation and brand name. More often than not, however, Black Swan incidents lead to the demise of medium-sized enterprises.

Yet, a majority of companies today are tempting fate with deficient BC/DR strategies and legacy technology. IT environments — increasingly global in nature — are susceptible to these unpredictable events, whether they are natural disasters or man-made, and are more fragile than their day to day stability suggests.

3

A “Black Swan” refers to the occurrence of events represented by a bell curve that has thicker tails on each end. If there is more mass in a tail of a probability distribution, this implies that extreme events occur with greater probability.

IT professionals who are responsible for ensuring the operational integrity of their company’s IT infrastructure must adopt faster, more advanced, more resilient BC/DR solutions to minimize the rare but always possible risks that cannot be anticipated.

Leading companies are migrating from legacy Disaster Recovery approaches to Disaster Avoidance disciplines and real-time Infrastructure Replication as a Service (IRaaS). In fact, Infrastructure Replication as a Service has become a powerful, practical IT utility for avoiding Black Swan events.

4

Now, the Good News

5

ANTIDOTE TO THE BLACK SWAN

The AntidoteWhat is needed to address the Black Swan problem is a transformational, unconventional approach. For example, NASA is integrating concepts from Complexity Science into their engineering process to help preempt these unwanted outliers. As well, leading BC/DR industry specialists are designing intelligent systems that can learn from their experience, better adapt to unforeseen events in their environment, and actually grow stronger over time.

At the forefront of this effort is real-time Infrastructure Replication as a Service (IRaaS), a new approach to IT disaster preparedness and avoidance that combines extremely fast recovery response, new disaster avoidance capabilities and deep storage retention for regulatory compliance.

Leading solutions are software based, providing real-time replication to semi-private, private or hybrid cloud architecture designed specifically for disaster recovery. As such, failover can be initiated in test mode to provide a complete mirrored infrastructure — including networking — for testing upgrades, patches and installs. By enabling safer, easier, less costly testing that can be conducted more frequently, IRaaS becomes an effective deterrent to Black Swan disasters.

Nowhere are these advances in detecting and preempting Black Swan events more relevant than in the areas of IT Disaster Avoidance and Recovery.

Forward thinking IT professionals and C- level decision makers are selecting disaster recovery specialists that are engineering these anti-fragile concepts into the core of their product strategy, utility and execution. These include the incorporation of frequent, random testing; the assimilation of incremental learning capabilities; and a regiment of continuous improvement in infrastructure safety and system continuity. These disciplines result in increasing resiliency over time.

6 6

7

KEY ADVANCED DISASTER RECOVERY COMPONENTS

Real-time Infrastructure Replication as a Service is a superior solution to reduce the risk of downtime caused by Black Swan events and human error. Some disaster recovery specialists are even compressing Recovery Time Objectives (RTOs) to just 2-5 minutes, with failover of entire virtualized infrastructures, including networking.

Real-time IRaaS offers critical advantages over legacy backup approaches.

• IRaaS dramatically improves the Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery

Point Objectives (RPOs) over traditional physical media backup.

• Even snapshot image-based cloud backup can’t meet the low RTO or RPO of IRaaS during failover, nor provide smooth failback.

Fully Managed Deep Storage Retention

IRaaS also has the capability for fully managed backup and deep storage data retention. Not only does this eliminate the cost of your current backup solution, but ensures long term data protection for compliance, historical business intelligence and regulatory or legal defense. This is ideal for highly regulated industries that must comply with the likes of HIPAA, MPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and SSAE 16 SOC 11 Audit & Review.

Disaster Avoidance Using Application and Failover Testing

IRaaS provides advanced disaster avoidance using application and failover testing that can benefit IT in several ways:

• IT professionals can failover in test mode to create a mirrored “sandbox” to test upgrades, patches and new applications well in advance of pushing to a production environment. This feature could have prevented the problems at the New York Stock exchange and the ensuing damage to brand reputations and revenues that pushed some traders to other exchanges.

• IRaaS enables a test failover of the complete mirrored infrastructure

without affecting the production environment or interrupting

replication. This failover testing can be provided as an inclusive service

on a regular basis for customers.

8

Infrastructure Replication as a Service

9

Purpose-Built Disaster Recovery Cloud

When choosing a cloud infrastructure in which to point your replication, there are great differences in the options. Large public clouds may seem attractive but it’s important to note the specific limitations of each, such as format, failback restrictions and control of resources. A purpose-built disaster recovery cloud is essentially a semi-private cloud specifically designed for higher performance and higher resiliency than a standard production hosting cloud environment.

Point-in-Time Journaling

Some IRaaS providers have the capability to provide Point-in-Time Journaling that enables recovery to be initiated from a time weeks or months prior to a failover event. This allows instant recovery from a time known to have a stable infrastructure, while the recent problem can be addressed.

Highly Available Geo-Redundancy

It’s not enough to simply co-locate your disaster recovery infrastructure offsite. Look for disaster recovery providers that have designed disaster-resiliency into everything from architecture to location selection. Make sure that disaster recovery data centers are based in areas where natural disasters are a low probability.

Multi-Vendor Solutions

Advances in protection from Black Swan events are moving quickly and it’s smart to partner with a provider that can advise about and provide best-of-breed supporting technology. This avoids being locked in to the provider’s proprietary solution, which creates clear biases in advising customers’ on DR solutions for their architecture.

Customer Support

Choose a disaster recovery provider that provides excellent customer support and engineer-level response on the first call. It is unacceptable to navigate through tiers of support to speak with an engineer at the onset of a failover emergency.

OPEX Pricing

IRaaS provides monthly OPEX-based pricing that eliminates the need for costly CAPEX investments, keeping company resources focused on your core capabilities instead of depreciating assets.

As goes a company’s IT uptime performance, so goes the company. When systems crash, careers and brand reputations are tarnished, client loyalty is damaged and market value plunges. And with this reality comes increasing pressure on the IT team and C-level leaders to minimize downtime and uncover potential disasters like Black Swan catastrophes before they strike.

Unfortunately, the available solutions to protect infrastructure and ward off unconventional threats — redundant hot-sites and high-availability replication — have been beyond the budgets of most organizations.

With new learnings gleaned from the likes of NASA and the emergence of new technologies like IRaaS, however, advanced testing and disaster avoidance capabilities are now available to Enterprise, mid-market and SMBs.

While Black Swan disasters will by their very nature continue to be elusive and difficult to predict, advanced Infrastructure Replication as a Service providers like Assuritive can provide forward-thinking organizations with every means to identify outlier threats and halt their advance.

Assuritive is an industry leading provider of Infrastructure Replication as a Service (IRaaS). Founded by leaders in IT infrastructure monitoring, management and digital ecosystem strategy, Assuritive applies automated intelligence methodologies for increasingly resilient system design in DRaaS Cloud architecture, operations and capabilities.

10

Conclusion