Scott Lowe, Wikibon analyst and founder of The 1610 Group, identified downtime as a major pain point for traditional IT shops. He advises CIOs who are struggling with system availability to adopt the following technologies and methodologies in order to “maximize their availability potential” of their infrastructure.

Automation

In Lowe’s experience, “the more that people have to touch things, the more likely it is that they will make mistakes.” These human errors can prove to be very costly when the
availability of mission-critical systems is on the line. He recommends that CIOs deploy management systems, data center orchestration tools and other automation software to help admins reduce the time they spend on routine tasks.

Change management
Lowe writes that “change can be a good thing, but when it goes unmanaged, it can wreak havoc in the data center and can also wreak havoc on other activities taking place in the organization.” He stresses that it’s essential to plan in advance and communicate change to users in order to ensure that a major upgrade won’t have negative impact on day-to-day operations.

Workload migration

Providing admins with workload migration tools should be another top priority for CIOs. Solutions such as VMware’s Distributed Resource Scheduler can help traditional enterprises bounce back from major hardware failures both faster and more smoothly.

Backup and recovery

Lowe urges organizations to assess and improve their backup and recovery policies. CIOs need to ask tough questions about their company’s recovery time objective (RTO), recovery point objective (RPO) and use case-specific needs.

Monitoring

Because problems are bound to crop up sooner or later, IT departments require tools that enable them to react in a timely fashion. Lowe highlights that the ability to know when a failure is about to occur is equally important. He advises CIOs to implement “comprehensive monitoring that goes down to the application level,” but notes that even the most basic monitoring solutions can provide admins with the foresight to prevent potentially disastrous failures.