IT Outages are a Matter of “When” Not “If”
Having established disaster recovery processes is critical to responding to outages in an organized and timely fashion. While the world at large is recovering from the Crowdstrike outage, which Delta Airlines alone claims cost more than $500 million, we had yet another Azure outage yesterday, which Forbes confirmed was due to a DDoS attack.
Of course, we have no way of knowing when the next major outage will be. We don’t know whether it will be the result of a mishandled update from a third-party vendor, cloud infrastructure failure, or something else altogether.
What’s becoming increasingly clear is enterprise IT teams need to refocus on business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR).
The question IT as an industry must answer is not “how do we ensure this never happens again?” but rather “what can we do to establish greater business continuity when the next major outage arises?”
How Can IT Enhance Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery?
Many industry analysts are using this incident to highlight the inherent risks of cloud services, prompting crucial discussions among CIOs. Although the outage related to the CrowdStrike update was one of the most catastrophic outages in recent memory, it is not the first-time organizations have faced such disruptions. Shortly before the CrowdStrike incident, Microsoft Azure experienced an outage in its US central region, affecting numerous organizations. While these outages are not daily occurrences, they do happen more frequently than some might acknowledge.
So, what must IT do?
Control Your Updates
Handing over control to third-party vendors may have gone too far. While there are absolutely benefits to offloading infrastructure and services, updates are far too volatile to go unchecked. As the world witnessed, it only takes a single faulty update to derail the foundations of our day-to-day world.
IT must be in full control of what updates are pushed AND when they go out.
Diversify Windows Desktop Solution Providers
If the operating system (OS) of your critical systems is impacted, you must be able to restore processes onto several different platforms concurrently. You cannot assume Microsoft will be able to have infrastructure back up in a timely manner and wait for systems to be restored. Even if organizations adopt physical endpoints over virtual desktops, they risk single points of failure. Future issues at the Windows layer could incapacitate most or all desktops. While an organization’s daily operations may not rely on cloud desktops, a disaster recovery plan should include the ability to scale into the cloud if necessary.
Perhaps your DR strategy to burst into the cloud if required will not include enough desktops for all employees, only for the most business-critical departments. Even if a system is in a degraded mode, it is better to get up and running until you get a more optimal solution back online.
This requires IT organizations to not put all their eggs in one basket – whether on-premises or the cloud.
Unlock Agility and Portability Across Systems with Modern Provisioning
Leverage Application Containers and Multi-Cloud Architectures
The key to business continuity is the agility to rapidly move between and across systems. We’ve spoken to numerous customers that found the quickest way for them to recover from the recent outage was to completely reimage their physical desktop estate. Of course, those using traditional application deployment technologies had to wait hours for their estate to be deployed.
While application containers alone will not prevent an outage, they provide a mechanism to rapidly move applications across desktop platforms, whether from hardware-to-hardware, hardware to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) and desktop as service (DaaS) platforms, between VDI and DaaS platforms, or from VDI/DaaS back to physical endpoints.
The beauty of application containers is you have a mechanism to dynamically provision applications outside of your desktop image, significantly reducing the time to reimage desktops and to deploy applications to end users on either reimaged or net-new end user desktops.
Eliminate Legacy Provisioning Tools
What does a multi-cloud disaster recovery approach for end user computing and Windows desktops look like? With frameworks like Terraform and Ansible, quickly building new desktops with the correct specifications, networking, and infrastructure components across any public cloud is easier than ever. Creating a minimal base image is straightforward with advanced desktop provisioning solutions and image management tools.
However, organizations face significant challenges when rapidly building desktops on alternative platforms due to their applications. Most enterprise applications are traditional Windows applications, managed via software distribution tools for physical endpoints or installed directly into virtual desktop images for non-persistent virtual desktops. This dual approach currently in use by most enterprises hinders the ability to quickly switch operating systems, desktops, or clouds.
Installing applications directly into images and rolling out updates via machine provisioning can further disrupt users during disaster recovery. This method can also cause application conflicts, image corruption, and image sprawl, complicating management and making it difficult to migrate to different platforms. Traditional software distribution solutions are too slow for non-persistent virtual desktops, exacerbating delays during disaster recovery.
Conclusion: Containerize Your Applications
The case for modernizing Windows application management has never been clearer. Reliance on outdated software distribution solutions and direct image installations are major barriers to enterprise resilience. Embracing modern solutions and strategies, namely application containers and multi-cloud architectures, is essential for ensuring business continuity in the face of future disruptions to desktops. Now is the time for IT to fortify its infrastructure and applications against widespread Windows crashes, long-term service degradation, and cloud outages.
Speak to an Expert
To discuss how application containers and application container management can enhance IT business continuity and disaster recovery for your enterprise, fill out the form below. Our Solutions Architects are more than happy to discuss how our solutions maximize application compatibility and portability across all modern physical and virtual Windows desktop environments, enabling you to dynamically operate across modern desktop and multi-cloud environments.
