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Maintaining Application Performance and Continuity in the Face of Natural Disasters

Stephen Pierzchala

Sadly, natural disasters often cause major devastation and wreckage. They can make a business prone to widespread power outages, transportation stoppages, and massive flooding, interrupting day-to-day physical operations and revenue streams. But recent advances in computing – specifically, the advent of Cloud computing – have made today’s data centers and the businesses they support much more resilient.

For example, if the recent Hurricane Sandy had any silver lining, it was this: even as data centers in the northeast took a beating, Cloud service providers and the overall Internet infrastructure remained solid. Compuware’s own Outage Analyzer indicated only a few scattered outages, and major service disruptions were avoided. As a result, many area businesses saw minimal disruption to critical business processes conducted online, including CRM, SCM, content management and accounting, with the worst effects limited to infrastructure and applications located in the worst hit areas of Manhattan.

The distributed nature of the Cloud made this possible by addressing the holy grail of business continuity — eliminating single points of failure. The ability to host data center assets off-premise in remote, distributed data centers can protect data and applications from a disaster, even if it’s a storm system spanning several hundred miles. When it comes to maintaining application performance (speed) and continuity in the face of a major natural disaster — or the constant day-to-day volatility of the Internet for that matter — here are three key takeaways:

1. Use the Cloud for Business Continuity

One of the most understated use cases for the Cloud is business continuity. People often think of the Cloud as a way to save money and gain agility, but the Cloud is also built for back-up and recovery, with geographically dispersed networks.

We expect that many businesses are going to start thinking more seriously about disaster recovery in the Cloud. Many businesses can't afford to put in the redundancy they have in a Cloud solution with an on-premise solution and make it accessible to so many people regardless of their location. If you have two feet of water in your data center, your servers and backup are likely gone; but if you are on one or more Cloud platforms, you can just drive to your local fast-food restaurant or library and be up-and-running.

2. Make Sure Your Chosen Cloud Service Provider Can Perform at the Level You Expect

When you select a Cloud service provider, you should make sure they can support the level of application performance your business requires on a day-to-day basis. Many Cloud service providers offer availability guarantees, but all this means is that their servers are up and running — not necessarily that your application end users are having a fast, high-quality experience.

You should also expect your Cloud service provider to be able to seamlessly move your applications – even without your awareness — in the event of an impending localized disaster. Many Cloud service providers offer standard back-up and disaster recovery services that make continuous access to data and applications for their clients a non-issue.

The extent to which a Cloud service provider is responsible for your back-up and disaster recovery depends on how you are using the Cloud services. If you’re using Cloud services in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model — a mode of software delivery in which software and associated data are centrally hosted on the Cloud — the Cloud service provider bears responsibility for ensuring your apps are redundant.

On the other hand, if you’re using Cloud services in an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provision model — meaning you’re “renting” from the Cloud the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components — responsibility for software management (including redundancy) remains with you.

3. Monitor Your Apps, 24x7

Even if you have the most reliable Cloud service provider in the world, there are still network and website components like CDNs, regional and local ISPs and third-party services that can degrade performance at the edge of the Internet. In fact, Compuware recently found that ad servers were the number one culprit when it comes to slowing or bringing down websites, choking the very sites from which they’re trying to generate revenue.

It doesn't take a natural disaster to create the first tear that rips apart other connections. Sometimes just one service getting hammered is all it takes to start a chain reaction that knocks your site off the web. Outages and slow-downs for network and website components can be completely random, and the truth is that the Internet has “little storms” like this all the time, caused by things as mundane as server failures, unplugged cables, backhoe-on-fiber collisions, and dragging fish boat anchors.

This means you need to take responsibility for understanding your own end-user experiences. You must monitor all your applications 24x7, storm or no storm, whether you’re using the Cloud or not. You must understand where your single points of failure are and eliminate them. You never want to get into a spot where your application is failing you, and it’s your customers letting you know.

In summary, regional presence should never determine one’s vulnerability to lost applications and data. Today’s data centers are more virtual than ever, and that’s a major plus in the face of all types of network events — natural disasters and otherwise. To cost-effectively protect your business operations, consider using the Cloud for business continuity; make sure your Cloud service provider meets your day-to-day application performance requirements as well as your back-up and disaster recovery requirements; and realize you are ultimately responsible for managing the performance of all your own applications, around the clock.

Stephen Pierzchala, Technology Strategist, Compuware APM's Center of Excellence.

Related Links:

Compuware Technology Strategist Joins the Vendor Forum

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Maintaining Application Performance and Continuity in the Face of Natural Disasters

Stephen Pierzchala

Sadly, natural disasters often cause major devastation and wreckage. They can make a business prone to widespread power outages, transportation stoppages, and massive flooding, interrupting day-to-day physical operations and revenue streams. But recent advances in computing – specifically, the advent of Cloud computing – have made today’s data centers and the businesses they support much more resilient.

For example, if the recent Hurricane Sandy had any silver lining, it was this: even as data centers in the northeast took a beating, Cloud service providers and the overall Internet infrastructure remained solid. Compuware’s own Outage Analyzer indicated only a few scattered outages, and major service disruptions were avoided. As a result, many area businesses saw minimal disruption to critical business processes conducted online, including CRM, SCM, content management and accounting, with the worst effects limited to infrastructure and applications located in the worst hit areas of Manhattan.

The distributed nature of the Cloud made this possible by addressing the holy grail of business continuity — eliminating single points of failure. The ability to host data center assets off-premise in remote, distributed data centers can protect data and applications from a disaster, even if it’s a storm system spanning several hundred miles. When it comes to maintaining application performance (speed) and continuity in the face of a major natural disaster — or the constant day-to-day volatility of the Internet for that matter — here are three key takeaways:

1. Use the Cloud for Business Continuity

One of the most understated use cases for the Cloud is business continuity. People often think of the Cloud as a way to save money and gain agility, but the Cloud is also built for back-up and recovery, with geographically dispersed networks.

We expect that many businesses are going to start thinking more seriously about disaster recovery in the Cloud. Many businesses can't afford to put in the redundancy they have in a Cloud solution with an on-premise solution and make it accessible to so many people regardless of their location. If you have two feet of water in your data center, your servers and backup are likely gone; but if you are on one or more Cloud platforms, you can just drive to your local fast-food restaurant or library and be up-and-running.

2. Make Sure Your Chosen Cloud Service Provider Can Perform at the Level You Expect

When you select a Cloud service provider, you should make sure they can support the level of application performance your business requires on a day-to-day basis. Many Cloud service providers offer availability guarantees, but all this means is that their servers are up and running — not necessarily that your application end users are having a fast, high-quality experience.

You should also expect your Cloud service provider to be able to seamlessly move your applications – even without your awareness — in the event of an impending localized disaster. Many Cloud service providers offer standard back-up and disaster recovery services that make continuous access to data and applications for their clients a non-issue.

The extent to which a Cloud service provider is responsible for your back-up and disaster recovery depends on how you are using the Cloud services. If you’re using Cloud services in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) business model — a mode of software delivery in which software and associated data are centrally hosted on the Cloud — the Cloud service provider bears responsibility for ensuring your apps are redundant.

On the other hand, if you’re using Cloud services in an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provision model — meaning you’re “renting” from the Cloud the equipment used to support operations, including storage, hardware, servers and networking components — responsibility for software management (including redundancy) remains with you.

3. Monitor Your Apps, 24x7

Even if you have the most reliable Cloud service provider in the world, there are still network and website components like CDNs, regional and local ISPs and third-party services that can degrade performance at the edge of the Internet. In fact, Compuware recently found that ad servers were the number one culprit when it comes to slowing or bringing down websites, choking the very sites from which they’re trying to generate revenue.

It doesn't take a natural disaster to create the first tear that rips apart other connections. Sometimes just one service getting hammered is all it takes to start a chain reaction that knocks your site off the web. Outages and slow-downs for network and website components can be completely random, and the truth is that the Internet has “little storms” like this all the time, caused by things as mundane as server failures, unplugged cables, backhoe-on-fiber collisions, and dragging fish boat anchors.

This means you need to take responsibility for understanding your own end-user experiences. You must monitor all your applications 24x7, storm or no storm, whether you’re using the Cloud or not. You must understand where your single points of failure are and eliminate them. You never want to get into a spot where your application is failing you, and it’s your customers letting you know.

In summary, regional presence should never determine one’s vulnerability to lost applications and data. Today’s data centers are more virtual than ever, and that’s a major plus in the face of all types of network events — natural disasters and otherwise. To cost-effectively protect your business operations, consider using the Cloud for business continuity; make sure your Cloud service provider meets your day-to-day application performance requirements as well as your back-up and disaster recovery requirements; and realize you are ultimately responsible for managing the performance of all your own applications, around the clock.

Stephen Pierzchala, Technology Strategist, Compuware APM's Center of Excellence.

Related Links:

Compuware Technology Strategist Joins the Vendor Forum

Hot Topics

The Latest

Artificial intelligence (AI) is core to observability practices, with some 41% of respondents reporting AI adoption as a core driver of observability, according to the State of Observability for Financial Services and Insurance report from New Relic ...

Application performance monitoring (APM) is a game of catching up — building dashboards, setting thresholds, tuning alerts, and manually correlating metrics to root causes. In the early days, this straightforward model worked as applications were simpler, stacks more predictable, and telemetry was manageable. Today, the landscape has shifted, and more assertive tools are needed ...

Cloud adoption has accelerated, but backup strategies haven't always kept pace. Many organizations continue to rely on backup strategies that were either lifted directly from on-prem environments or use cloud-native tools in limited, DR-focused ways ... Eon uncovered a handful of critical gaps regarding how organizations approach cloud backup. To capture these prevailing winds, we gathered insights from 150+ IT and cloud leaders at the recent Google Cloud Next conference, which we've compiled into the 2025 State of Cloud Data Backup ...

Private clouds are no longer playing catch-up, and public clouds are no longer the default as organizations recalibrate their cloud strategies, according to the Private Cloud Outlook 2025 report from Broadcom. More than half (53%) of survey respondents say private cloud is their top priority for deploying new workloads over the next three years, while 69% are considering workload repatriation from public to private cloud, with one-third having already done so ...

As organizations chase productivity gains from generative AI, teams are overwhelmingly focused on improving delivery speed (45%) over enhancing software quality (13%), according to the Quality Transformation Report from Tricentis ...

Back in March of this year ... MongoDB's stock price took a serious tumble ... In my opinion, it reflects a deeper structural issue in enterprise software economics altogether — vendor lock-in ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 15, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses Do-It-Yourself Network Automation ... 

Zero-day vulnerabilities — security flaws that are exploited before developers even know they exist — pose one of the greatest risks to modern organizations. Recently, such vulnerabilities have been discovered in well-known VPN systems like Ivanti and Fortinet, highlighting just how outdated these legacy technologies have become in defending against fast-evolving cyber threats ... To protect digital assets and remote workers in today's environment, companies need more than patchwork solutions. They need architecture that is secure by design ...

Traditional observability requires users to leap across different platforms or tools for metrics, logs, or traces and related issues manually, which is very time-consuming, so as to reasonably ascertain the root cause. Observability 2.0 fixes this by unifying all telemetry data, logs, metrics, and traces into a single, context-rich pipeline that flows into one smart platform. But this is far from just having a bunch of additional data; this data is actionable, predictive, and tied to revenue realization ...

64% of enterprise networking teams use internally developed software or scripts for network automation, but 61% of those teams spend six or more hours per week debugging and maintaining them, according to From Scripts to Platforms: Why Homegrown Tools Dominate Network Automation and How Vendors Can Help, my latest EMA report ...