Five ways to build a resilient, future-proof IT infrastructure

As organizations prepare for a post-pandemic world, it’s time to rethink IT strategies and focus on building a resilient tech infrastructure. We list five important things to keep in mind as you move to modernize your IT setup to stand the test of time.

1. Create an optimum hybrid environment

Sometimes, regulatory, compliance, and governance restrictions in some sectors or geographies prevent businesses from moving to a 100 percent cloud infrastructure. Software licenses that are not cloud-friendly and legacy applications that just aren’t suited to the public cloud add to the problem. Therefore, many organizations struggle with the idea of making a complete switch to the cloud, continuing to retain some on-site infrastructure.

They look for service providers and partners that enable a hybrid approach – by designing and building the best infrastructure solution for an interconnected environment, which utilizes the best of cloud and on premises deployments to fulfil the needs of their business. This allows businesses to enjoy the scalability benefits of the public cloud for applications with heavy traffic, use edge computing technologies for applications requiring low latency, and deploy business-critical or regulated applications on their private cloud to ensure security and control – all within the umbrella of a hybrid cloud environment. As the hybrid cloud model gains popularity, the question among adopters today is not why hybrid, but how hybrid.

2. Harness the power of a multi-cloud strategy

For those already in the cloud, multi-cloud solution strategies are becoming the norm as they enable great business flexibility. Multi-cloud architecture empowers organizations to distribute their workloads across multiple cloud environments so they can take advantage of the relative strengths between cloud providers and get the best value for money while also mitigating risks associated with individual cloud environments – a value proposition that’s certain to drive the growth and adoption of multi-cloud infrastructure solutions by businesses in the future.

Another important advantage of using multi-cloud is it prevents organizations from getting locked into a particular cloud provider's infrastructure, add-on services, and pricing model. Like Michael Warrilow, VP Analyst at Gartner said, “Most organizations adopt a multi-cloud strategy out of a desire to avoid vendor lock-in or to take advantage of best-of-breed solutions”.

3. Transform IT operations with AIOps

Did you know about 52 percent of companies on the Fortune 500 list have become obsolete since the year 2000 – just because they could not keep up with digital evolution? A few years later, IT Ops automation has evolved as a growing need for the business world’s future success.

According to IBM, automation is the future of IT resilience. And modern-day businesses must ensure they develop smart workflows via automated processes to make sure revenue, profitability, growth, and customer experience doesn’t suffer. AIOps (artificial intelligence for IT operations) tools facilitate this. These tools are built either to automate mundane tasks – allowing IT operators to focus more on strategic work that adds business value, or to perform tasks that are beyond human capabilities.

Often, poor predictability of capacity causes outages and slowdowns in IT systems and applications. With AIOps, systems can predict load patterns and even correlate with business metrics to automate the scaling of infrastructure, or schedule routine maintenance such as patching, upgrades, new releases, and backups during low-impact time windows.

4. Embrace open source for greater choice, customization, and cost savings

Many IT leaders today are using open-source practices to work towards ensuring the durability and sustainability of future technologies.

Existing for over two decades, open-source software (OSS) refers to any computer software that is distributed with a modifiable source. Likewise, by coming up with cutting-edge, super-efficient designs that any company can use (and modify) to build their hardware, the open-source hardware (OSH) concept facilitates reimagining hardware and making it more efficient, flexible, and scalable.

Best performing open-source examples in the business world include Google, Facebook, Twitter, Netflix, Kubernetes, HAProxy, Adobe, IBM, Intel, Mozilla’s Firefox, PHP and Red Hat. As a global community of tech enthusiasts continue working together to break open the black box of proprietary IT infrastructure, more and more businesses must wake up to the benefits of adopting open-source methodologies that are cost-effective, environmentally friendly, and easy to modify – which meets the requirements of emerging technologies like 5G, AI, and Edge.

5. Ensure data protection

The rise of hybrid and multi-cloud is creating a whole host of complex security challenges. For example, a recent report by Forrester highlights that application weaknesses and software vulnerabilities continue to be the most common external attack method for businesses. Powerful technologies like web application firewalls (WAF) are helping organizations protect their critical web applications by filtering, monitoring, and blocking malicious traffic traveling to those applications, and preventing any unauthorized data from leaving the app. Modern WAF technologies can be deployed either on premises or in the cloud supporting hybrid and multi-cloud deployment methods.

Earlier security technologies including, but not limited to WAF, were typically installed with on-premise hardware or application-based solutions. Today, the majority of security solutions can be deployed to support hybrid and multi-cloud architecture. Modern businesses are increasingly relying on cloud-based technologies because they are low cost, scale better, and protect them from incoming threats and attacks. They add an extra layer of protection to keep business-critical data, applications, and networks safe by providing the best security for multiple application hosting environments, including cloud, on-premise, hybrid, and multi-cloud.

Loadbalancer.org is a company built on open-source software. We design high-performing, less complex load balancing appliances to ensure that our clients’ businesses are never interrupted. Our load balancers – hardware, virtual, or cloud – are built on the most advanced load balancing technology and licensed for unrestricted throughput and bandwidth. They come equipped with WAF as a standard feature, adding that much-needed extra layer of security to your business applications.

Our experience enables us to bring a depth of understanding to each deployment. It helps us ask the right questions and provide excellent industry-leading tech support for all our products via email, phone, and online chat. Our support team is always available to assist clients with personalized support and help them seamlessly migrate across platforms and environments.

Visit our products page for help deciding on the right load balancing solution for your business.