The Role Of Automation In Managing Resilience In Hybrid Multicloud

• Most firms are expanding their hybrid multicloud use.

  Seventy percent of the respondents in our study said their firms are expanding their use of hybrid multicloud while another 29% reported their companies have at least implemented it. Our study found most application data is being spread across a mixture of on-premises, hybrid multicloud, and private clouds. In 2019, firms led their cloud migrations with core operations applications, followed by customer-facing applications, with core record-keeping applications trailing.¹ Our study shows that corporate applications and customer-facing applications are the most likely to be moving to hybrid multicloud in the next two years. Hybrid multicloud decision makers are focusing on these applications to address customer and employee experience initiatives first. Focusing on CX first should not delay core application improvements for long.

• Hybrid multicloud drives increased infrastructure complexity.

  Our study found 33% of hybrid multicloud decision makers are currently configuring cloud infrastructure based on changing IT needs while an additional 46% intend to do so over the next two years (see Figure 1). In the next two years, many tech leaders will prioritize moving and securing their data while continuously monitoring ongoing operations. The increased IT complexities created by hybrid multicloud is causing and will continue to cause decision makers to focus on creating agile environments. Environments that are flexible and allow for easy integration will help them stay functional while remaining secure. Data will take center stage as cloud migration accelerates.

The demand for flexibility makes management across cloud and traditional platforms critical.

• A range of incidents cause costly downtime.

  Nearly half (46%) of hybrid multicloud decision makers have experienced unexpected downtime at their firms in the past year. The causes of this downtime revealed in our study range from software or hardware failure to data loss or corruption, human errors, and cyberattacks. Of all the different types of incidents that caused downtime, cyberattacks and data breaches have the largest impact on the business’s revenue and customer experiences (see Figure 2). Compliance or regulatory violations and data loss/data corruption are a distant second and third.

  
  

  Respondents told us that incidents like cyberattacks and data loss are most likely to result in financial or reputational damage whereas incidents like human error, natural disasters, and regulatory violations often result in legal damage to the firm. For this study, we asked hybrid multicloud decision makers about the impact of downtime, meaning the business’s ability to function, including revenue and CX. We found that the loss of information, revenue, or customers, as well as breached contracts or regulatory noncompliance, can affect the entire company. Perhaps most concerning, these failures can lead to reputational damage, including a loss of trust from customers, stakeholders, and investors.

• Manual recovery systems don't operate at the speed of customers' needs.

  Thirty-two percent of respondents said their firms continuously monitor ongoing hybrid multicloud operations, and 41% report they will continuously monitor ongoing hybrid multicloud operation over the next two years. But this passive approach isn’t enough. Our study showed that nearly a third (32%) of hybrid multicloud decision makers’ organizations primarily use tools that require manual intervention to address testing, monitoring, and data backup, likely costing significantly more than fully automated solutions.

  
  

  What’s more, organizations will not be able to handle the increasing complexity with manual processes. The nature of technology, particularly software-enabled technology, means that increased scalability and flexibility naturally lead to greater complexity. While technology scales, though, the ability to manage it through manual processes doesn’t.⁴

• Culture constrains the move to resilience automation.

  Your firm must explicitly address the people side of automating dependency and risk planning, event detection, and recovery. Over time, automation will replace some of your staff, and the fear of job loss will create resistance to training and then working alongside the automation technology.⁵ Your leaders must actively address career development for post-automation employment — on an individual level. And for skills development, encourage people to take risks, reward them for successful ones, and treat failures as education, not punishable offenses. When Forrester asked the CIO at a large retailer about automation, he said: “I have the right people and tools already. My main job here is to create an environment where they can flourish. Right now, we do not have that.”⁶

• Finding skilled staff is a top challenge.

  One-third of hybrid multicloud decision makers in our study agreed their firms do not have the right skills to manage their hybrid multicloud resilience processes. Another third said they do not have the staff with the right skills to recover quickly from downtime (see Figure 3).This leaves decision makers to hire/onboard partners to fill in the gaps of their hybrid multicloud resilience processes. Of the industries in our study, retail firms are the most likely not to have enough staff, not to have staff with the right skills, and to turn to partners to help with their hybrid multicloud resilience processes.

• Use of automation as a core solution at every phase of the resilience process.

  Recovery has been a largely manual process, but respondents expect to increase their use of automation to significantly improve speed and accuracy. Only one-third of respondents today reported that their firms use automation at every part of their resilience process, but the number of respondents who expect to do so in two years is dramatically higher, nearly doubling to 60% (see Figure 5)

  
  

  Resilience automation does more than just minimize downtime. Resilience automation goes beyond helping to meet business goals to hitting top IT targets — like faster recovery times and end-to-end optimization. Improved resilience automation drives top business targets by using scripts to take previously manual recovery activities and execute them with software. Decision makers in our survey saw resilience automation as a way to increase productivity, improve customer and employee experience, and gain customer trust.