8 Tips for Improving your Organization’s Resilience [step-by-step]

It is no secret that organizational resilience has changed in the technology industry over the past few years, especially where cloud computing is concerned; this has left IT managers scrambling to find ways to utilize the cloud. But also finding themselves confused about which changes to make and what the most effective strategy should be. If you are looking to improve your organization’s resilience while maintaining high productivity, here are some tips on how to do it using the cloud.

1) Backup and Recovery

When choosing how to back up and recover from a cloud solution, you first need to identify the value of the data — not all data is created equal — some applications may have multiple copies across many servers and require different approaches. It is necessary to determine the critical or non-critical systems involved and how long you can be without access to your data. The definition of critical varies depending on what makes your organization successful. However, it is good to realize, so you aren’t caught off guard by temporary outages.

2) Unified IT management

Unified IT management is a technology architecture that consolidates all aspects of enterprise IT in a single system. With that kind of control, IT can keep track of information systems more effectively and help prevent failures before they occur. Also, a unified IT management system simplifies disaster recovery and business continuity. A single system also makes it easier to update and upgrade existing software. A unified architecture increases organizational resilience by providing insight into an enterprise operations architecture. Cloud-based services offer robust redundancy while providing efficient response times if one data center goes down due to outages or natural disasters such as floods or fires.

3) Integration

The cloud makes it easier to combine data from multiple sources and systems—and that’s good news for collaboration. For example, a cloud-based PSA solution could consolidate all of an organization’s marketing databases into one interface, simplifying performance analytics while giving marketers access to customer insights across channels. But keep in mind that even if you opt for a multi-tenant or single-instance solution, integrating isn’t something that happens overnight. Cloud integrations aren’t as simple as importing and exporting files—they require several rounds of testing and troubleshooting before they deliver results. The good news is there are plenty of things organizations can do to make sure their integrations are successful from day one.

4) Transparency into operations

A recent survey by Oracle of IT professionals shows that 70% will migrate workloads to the public cloud. Many companies use enterprise resource planning (ERP) software, which manages business processes and includes financial, human resources, and inventory management functionality. The more flexible cloud-based solution offers a more transparent view of operations and allows users to be more informed about overall progress and efficiency. This transparency increases organizational agility.

5) Automation

One of the most significant benefits of cloud computing to companies is automation. Having access to scalable, on-demand resources allows you to eliminate unnecessary IT processes. By eliminating these time-intensive tasks, you can enable yourself and other employees within your organization to focus on more important things. As a result, you’ll be able to effectively manage unexpected occurrences while also improving performance across all areas of your business. With increased automation comes better performance and improved reliability with lower costs; what more could a company want?

6) Agility

The cloud offers several tools to help you achieve agility. Whether you are designing a cross-functional, collaborative process between multiple departments or simply trying to make collaboration easier across regions, virtualization is one of your best tools. Having the ability to access data and applications from anywhere provides agility that works regardless of organizational structure. Whether located in California or Cambodia, accessing a database enables instant collaboration with other professionals. When collaborating with other colleagues, it is important to ensure information is protected and encrypted.

7) Security

Keep it up-to-date. To ensure security compliance with industry regulations and government policies, you should set up a security budget and allocate the needed resources. A strong focus on security is a component of any solid business continuity plan, so don’t cut corners here. Cloud computing can also bring some advantages when it comes to staying compliant with all these regulations—it can help organizations keep their data safer and more secure. A recent survey by Osterman Research found that 93 percent of organizations expect security to improve once they implement cloud services; just 46 percent felt that way about their current internal systems. You should feel confident in investing in a solution that will keep you on track without bringing unnecessary risk or downtime down upon your organization’s head.

8) Sustainability

The cloud enables organizations to reduce operating costs while improving business continuity, resiliency, and environmental footprint. From an IT perspective, if you want to be sustainable, there are changes to consider like virtualization of business-critical workloads; optimized capacity planning; Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS); consolidation of data centers into shared facilities; and others. If you follow these guidelines, you can achieve better sustainability than most other companies with more complex strategies – not only lowering your carbon footprint but reducing business costs, too.

Conclusion

The cloud offers a variety of opportunities to improve organizational resilience, whether it be improving recovery options or helping with business continuity plans. When used wisely, businesses can benefit from having data and applications reside off-site in a more secure environment. Unfortunately, certain risks come with using technology hosted on someone else’s hardware. That’s why you need to have a complete understanding of the risk you are comfortable taking on by moving to the cloud—and ensure you have processes in place to mitigate any possible issues should something go wrong.