Enhancing Business Continuity With Application Visibility

Sameer Malhotra is cofounder and CEO of TrueFort, a former Wall Street tech exec and an expert in IT infrastructure and cybersecurity.

When we talk about business continuity, what usually comes to mind is disaster recovery, backup processes and resilience planning. These elements are critical, but there’s one aspect that’s often underemphasized: the value of application visibility. Without it, even the most carefully developed business continuity plan can fall short of its objective.

A lapse in continuity, even for a few minutes, can translate to financial losses, damaged reputations and customer churn. But although business continuity plans are indispensable, they can’t achieve their potential unless they’re continuously tested and validated, and that’s where application visibility comes into play.

As every CIO knows, there’s a significant gap between developing a plan and ensuring it works when needed. The true test of a continuity strategy lies in its execution, and successful execution requires visibility into your applications’ real-time behavior and health.

Gaps In Continuity Planning

Although developing a continuity plan is essential, there are three specific challenges that can undermine its effectiveness:

1. The Restore Process

The ability to back up data is critical, but the real challenge lies in restoring it. Without continuous validation, restore processes can easily fail at the moment they’re needed most. For example, if a backup script hasn’t been checked recently, the restoration could stall, causing delays in bringing systems back online.

2. Automated Failover And Software Updates

Continuity plans often rely on automated failover processes to switch operations from one site to a backup location in case of an outage. But software updates or infrastructure changes can silently disrupt these processes.

3. Manual Testing

Many organizations dedicate significant time each month to manually testing continuity plans to confirm they’ll work in a real-world scenario. Although valuable, this is a time-consuming and costly process.

Why Application Visibility Matters

The ability to monitor software applications in real time provides insights into everything from dependencies to behavioral patterns. This visibility is invaluable for identifying potential points of failure before they turn into costly issues.

Achieving application visibility comes with a set of challenges that can complicate continuity planning. First, applications are often composed of multiple interdependent services running across on-premises, cloud and hybrid environments, making it difficult to gain a unified view of dependencies and behaviors. Centralized visibility tools that consolidate data from all environments can provide a single, unified view of dependencies and behaviors across your entire application landscape.

Here are some best practices for strengthening business continuity:

Continuous Monitoring Of Dependencies

Enterprise applications often comprise interdependent services and processes, spanning on-premises and cloud environments. Use application visibility to track these dependencies, enabling proactive adjustments to the continuity plan when changes occur. For example, if one service frequently crashes or is slow, this insight helps adjust the failover strategy so that the impact on end users is minimized.

Automated Validation Of Failover Processes

Manual testing can reveal issues, but automated, visibility-driven validation ensures that failover processes are continuously checked. If there’s an unexpected behavior in a component, visibility tools can flag this in real time, triggering a check or even an automated switch to the backup environment. This not only reduces costs associated with manual testing but also ensures continuity is maintained seamlessly.

Real-Time Alerts For Proactive Responses

Use application visibility to set up real-time alerts that notify your team of anomalies or suspicious behaviors. These alerts enable quick responses and even preemptive action before a minor issue spirals into a larger outage. If a new software patch causes unexpected behavior in a critical application, visibility tools can trigger alerts and allow the IT team to roll back the update.

Self-Healing Mechanisms

Incorporate automated responses to common issues discovered by application visibility. For example, if a service is unresponsive, configure a policy to restart the process automatically. This form of self-healing ensures minimal disruption and helps maintain continuity with minimal manual intervention.

Effective Resource Allocation

Continuity planning is resource-intensive; use application visibility to prioritize resources where they’re most needed. By analyzing historical data on application behavior, CIOs can identify patterns and allocate resources to address recurring issues, ultimately reducing the need for frequent, resource-heavy testing.

Additionally, regular updates and software changes can introduce new risks or disrupt visibility, particularly when teams lack real-time insights into how these changes impact failover or restore processes. Use monitoring solutions that track changes immediately and alert the team when updates impact critical components, helping maintain a consistent view of application health.

Resource limitations are also a common obstacle, as manual testing for continuity can be time-consuming and labor-intensive, often stretching IT teams thin. Automate key validation processes, such as failover testing, to reduce the resource burden and ensure that continuity plans are always up to date without excessive manual intervention.

Despite these challenges, overcoming them is essential. Without full visibility, continuity plans can fail at critical moments, leaving organizations exposed to costly downtime and operational disruptions. By addressing these visibility challenges, CIOs can help ensure that continuity plans are reliable, actionable and adaptive, ultimately strengthening resilience and safeguarding business operations in the face of unexpected events.

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