Mitigating Risks at a Datacenter during a crisis

Datacenter professionals deal with risk management and mitigation on a day to day basis. Over the years, various crisis such as security attacks, downtimes due natural disasters have been successfully mitigated. However, the likelihood and impact of our current crisis in impossible to predict with accuracy. History tells us that here is a potential for widespread and costly disruptions for those who fail to prepare adequately.

In the wake of this crisis it becomes important for any datacenter professional to plan and optimize to ensure the business still runs.  

Plan –

The planning process of any disaster recovery effort must lie with the business-critical applications that are essential to the organization. Business critical applications, being the bread and butter of any organization must be protected from any unplanned downtimes and must be accessible at any given time.

Here are some steps you can use to plan for disasters –

1. Identify the dependencies of the mission critical applications
2. Detailed inventories must be conducted regularly to ensure if there are any changes to the systems or their dependencies.
3. Prepare the personnel for a disaster – the best plan in the world will not amount to much if the facility doesn’t plan its personnel for disaster recovery. Each person should be aware of their duties in case a disaster strike.

Optimize –

In the wake of a disaster situation, there is a strong likelihood that all systems may not be brought online immediately. During this situation, it is important to prioritize the limited compute resources to the applications that are most mission critical.

For all other applications that are not time sensitive, compute resources must be rationed amongst the others by rightsizing the VM’s that are over-provisioned.

Planning and optimizing to mitigate risks are integral to the crisis we face currently. Due to a lack of manpower or staff that is only available through remote access, it becomes essential that disaster recovery is self-driving. For that, a tool such as Uila can be used to plan and optimize the datacenter.

Uila can be used as a tool to plan and optimize the datacenter during a moment of crisis.

Using Uila’s automated Application Dependency mapping, datacenter professionals get a full picture of their datacenter to help them plan for any contingencies.

This dependency map can be exported into excel sheet that can help in prioritizing the connections based on the protocol and the amount of traffic that traverses.

Finally, Uila’s VM resource usage report can be used to right size the VM’s by providing an accurate picture of compute resources that’s used throughout the environment.