RECAP | Meeting modern IT challenges

Uptime Institute’s June 25th roundtable discussion brought together data center infrastructure resiliency participants from around the world, who are helping their organizations to innovate and implement new digital resiliency architectures. Uptime Institute’s Todd Traver and Dr. Rabih Bashroush, who have developed a methodology for assessing multi-platform, multi-facility IT architectures, led the roundtable.

In order to establish a shared framework for discussion, Traver encouraged each of the participants to share their experiences and challenges implementing digital resiliency programs in their companies. These experiences proved useful during the conversation, as many similarities became apparent, with all the participant’s programs having similar intents and structures, with language and terminology being the biggest difference.

Roundtable participants also agreed that the biggest challenge implementing a digital resiliency program in their company is often the difficulty of changing mindsets and cultures ingrained in the IT industry, with more than one party saying that significant change became easier after a downtime incident. The disruption “half-life of pain” caused by the downtime incident could serve as an opportunity and leverage for an organization to champion and introduce a new way of thinking about digital resiliency, with one participant developing the measure of lost transactions as the most meaningful metric for quantifying business impact.

The participants shared other common experiences, with one participant noting that while initial software releases often have some degree of testing and approval, the importance of workflow for even small subsequent software patches, are hydra-headed, incorporating many small changes, which are not as thoroughly tested, and which become a significant potential source of error. Larger releases could be even more difficult, with one participant finding that a single release required more than 3000 servers to operate properly—but no one had discussed the release with the facilities infrastructure team, only to find that there was insufficient space and power to adequately and resiliently provision for this new release.

Finally, the participants took time to evaluate measures of organizational readiness. They noted that different objectives among specialties often led to different project expectations and an under appreciation of the role and needs of other team members. This shortcoming tended to be pretty prevalent among application developers, said one participant, who also noted the industry-wide shortage of these specialists.

The 60-minute discussion wrapped up with consensus that digital innovators would benefit from the emergence of a community dedicated to digital resiliency architectures and implementations. This community could reduce internal corporate barriers to innovation, while also helping establish a common lexicon and skillset for the various specialists in the field.