How to improve IT application performance and reliability

IT performance and reliability can make or break a business. Downtime is expensive, and its costs reach well beyond lost productivity. Businesses that cannot ensure operational integrity risk tarnishing their corporate brands and their customers’ experiences. Achieving necessary performance and availability are critical to your business’s success.

To increase reliability and avoid unplanned downtime, IT organizations need to build resiliency against the unexpected: human errors, technology or infrastructure failures, disasters, and cyber incidents. Application availability targets can be achieved with a combination of end-to-end measures that increase redundancy, increase security, provide for failovers, and enable quick recovery from incidents and outages.

What are four common challenges around IT application performance and reliability, and how do you address them?
 

“My customer needs higher SLA levels than I can deliver."

The ability to meet a customer’s service level agreement (SLA) requirements increases a business’ ability to win new business and retain existing customers.

Work with a provider that delivers higher SLAs for application performance and reliability with services that can be tailored and combined to fit workload needs and organizational requirements. Utilize data centers, colocation, and network services combined with cloud, data protection, and professional services that deliver five- and six-nine’s availability SLAs, with fast recovery points. You need tailored solutions that are designed and implemented to be secure, available, and performance-optimized to meet demanding customer SLAs.

“I need to ensure my applications are always available.”

Application availability hinges on combining redundant and highly available infrastructure, defending against interruptions, and recovering quickly from unexpected downtime. Outages happen, and businesses need to be prepared to swiftly address them to help ensure 100% uptime for their applications and data. However, many organizations lack a comprehensive approach to protect and recover from the unexpected. 

Organizations need disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) strategies with near-zero RTO/RPO and testing options to promote confidence in the safety of applications and data during a failover. To reduce the risk of cyber disruptions, work with a provider that offers proactive, preventative, and comprehensive risk and cybersecurity services. To protect your most critical applications, a range of high-availability infrastructure options should be tailored to your requirements.

“Every time my ISP has an outage in Minnesota, my users in the Midwest cannot access their applications.”

In a digital world, connectivity is king. However, the lack of a diverse and redundant connectivity strategy means a simple ISP outage can cripple businesses.

Work with a provider that offers a highly redundant network architecture with points of presence (POPs) in every major U.S. carrier hotel. Build connectivity strategies that promote network resiliency, performance, security, manageability, and visibility by leveraging network architecture services from a third-party provider. This will allow you to support network availability for the clouds, colocation, edge, on-premises, and third-party services you need to connect while protecting user experiences from outages.

“How do I achieve visibility of my infrastructure capacity and performance so I know when to plan infrastructure refreshes?”

IT teams need visibility into their IT environments to help plan for the future. Without insight into their environments, performance can suffer and impact the business’s ability to maintain its competitive edge. You need real-time visibility into infrastructure capacity and performance.

Work with a provider that offers a holistic view of environments, allowing you to monitor and manage your colocation, cloud, DRaaS, and backup-as-a-service (BaaS) environments in real time. This should include 24x7 operations management for your DevOps environment, including container orchestration, automation, and observability.

Flexential provides organizations with the ability to resist, absorb, recover, and adapt to predictable and unpredictable business interruptions in an ever-changing and complex digital environment.

Flexential can help you solve your challenges around application performance and reliability here.