There was a time when people thought that moving to public cloud infrastructure meant the end of having to worry about resiliency – that hyperscalers had that all covered.
Just because someone else is responsible for avoiding and responding to outages doesn’t mean they’re a possibility that can be ignored . Countless recent examples have shown that hyperscalers can run into difficulties of their own, whether that’s brief outages or total platform failure.
As Corey Quinn, AWS expert at the Duckbill Group, explains: “AWS or any other hyperscaler going down poses such a deep systemic risk to basically everyone and everything.”
It’s not just a case of where your data and apps are located, but where those of your suppliers and their suppliers are, too. Businesses that rely heavily on the internet are particularly at risk, as Quinn explains, giving the example of an online retailer which is not on AWS but uses a shopping cart provider that is.
“[If] there’s a big outage that takes out AWS and your shopping cart provider is all in on AWS and they're down … or your shopping cart provider is up but one of their critical third party dependencies is on AWS and that goes down and that in turn takes them down as well. How do you solve these problems?” he says.
While you can’t control everyone else’s stack as effectively as your own, one way to build resiliency, while still taking full advantage of what the cloud has to offer, is to consider a hybrid, multi-cloud strategy. This allows you to mitigate the risk of any one service going down and also ensure you have the level of control you want over the things that are most important to your business.
“In terms of GreenLake and the public cloud, HPE looks at it very much like a symbiotic relationship,” explains Adrian Lovell, CTO - Financial Services Industry at HPE. “You can just have an HPE GreenLake environment if you like, and for some organizations that’s the right approach, but for the lion’s share of organizations it’s going to be a combination of everything.”
“[That could be] potentially multiple public cloud providers, potentially some smaller service providers offering specialist services, and then your GreenLake environment for some of your own applications in locations where you want them to be.”
“That might be a cost-driven conversation or a control-driven conversation - there are all sorts of different reasons why you might want to do something separately to other providers, in the same way we select any technology.”
Watch the short video above to hear from Solutions Experts from HPE on how GreenLake can help your business address resiliency challenges, and streamline your cloud adoption journey.
For more on HPE GreenLake and to watch the Clouded film, click here.
More on HPE Clouded
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