Resilience is all about how well you can recover from events that threaten the current stability of your operations, the long-term viability of your business or its future development. It’s an issue that applies to people as well as technology. How well can your IT team adapt in the face of adversity — and how well will they rebound afterwards?
What events can threaten my business operations?
Events that can threaten your operations include:
- Inability to access physical infrastructure to carry out routine maintenance
- Rapid increase of workloads that are overwhelming your network or servers
- Requirement to provide remote access to resources that are normally only available from company premises
- Urgent need to reduce or optimise your costs because revenues are falling steeply.
Why cloud computing is the answer to your infrastructure needs
Adding cloud computing into your technology mix will let you create infrastructure that’s naturally more resilient. Cloud solutions will:
- enable secure, authenticated access from anywhere for your end users and your IT team
- scale as needed, on demand, helping you to match costs to consumption
- support innovation, by making it easier to leverage the latest hardware, software and platform advances
- let your in-house team concentrate on meeting business needs rather than repetitive routine operations
Cloud computing for app development and existing applications
You can use the cloud for any app development, of course, but you should also consider the options for using cloud computing for your existing applications:
- Lift and Shift — move existing virtual machines into the cloud. You don’t need to change your applications, tools, processes and policies but your infrastructure immediately becomes more resilient. This is because it's running over scalable cloud architecture spread across multiple sites rather than on hardware in a single data centre.
- Lift and Optimise — move workloads onto cloud-native virtual infrastructure. As well as giving you the improved resilience that comes with pure lift and shift, this option helps you optimise other aspects of your IT operations. For example, you can improve application performance while reducing costs through access to on-demand resources automatically matched to changing workloads. Your team will have to learn how to work with this new infrastructure, but it provides an easier path to further modernisation at your own pace.
- Lift and Modernise — containerise your workloads. Putting each of your applications into a container with everything you need to run it lets you deploy and manage applications anywhere in a secure and consistent way. With containers, you can run applications using fewer resources — lowering your costs — and build and deploy new applications much more quickly. That makes you more resilient in the face of business uncertainty as you can now respond at speed to changing business needs.
How we helped our cosmetics company, Lush, migrate to the cloud in just 22 days
Of course, there are challenges and costs in any migration, but Google and Google Cloud partners like Ancoris can support you with tools, methodologies and services that make even complex migrations successful at speed. Take the example of handmade cosmetics company Lush. It was able to migrate applications powering 17 separate e-commerce websites to Google Cloud in just 22 days.
To find out more about how modernising your infrastructure can improve resilience in your business, read about 5 ways digital transformation improves business continuity.
Working with a Google Cloud Platform Premier Partner
As a leading Google Cloud Service Partner, we have considerable experience with Google Cloud Platform, both assisting clients to future proof their business with cloud infrastructure.
Cloud adoption is not just about agility and cost optimisation — it’s about building the very foundations you need to continuously innovate and stay ahead. A cloud-first architecture using Google Cloud Platform not only modernises your infrastructure but unlocks a whole new world of digital freedom and opportunity.
Our onboarding methodology will help you realise value in weeks, not months so you can save costs and increase agility.
If you’d like to find out more about how we can help you, why not take a look at some of our customer success stories or talk to the experts in our Google Cloud Platform team.
