The New Normal Will Still Include High Availability
The importance of uptime in a post pandemic world
As vaccines roll into production and roll out to facilities and communities, and companies are beginning to prepare for reentry to normal. Many articles and writers, both in technical and non-technical spheres, are predicting that ‘normal’ in the post-pandemic era will look a lot different from the ‘normal’ we were used to in 2020. Experts vary, but genuinely agree that every business and type of industry will see a change in what was ‘normal’. This change will affect everything from academics to manufacturing plants to financial institutions to houses of worship. And while the new normal will potentially look different than it did when we abruptly left these places in 2020, some things will still be a part of the new normal.
Four reasons High Availability will still be included in the new normal of 2021.
New database and application systems. Predictions abound that home delivery, home schooling, home entertainment, and even home gyms will be a booming part of the future. This boom will lead to new businesses and these new businesses will deploy cloud services and applications that need to be highly available to handle the additional online shopping, growth in shipping, and related services from manufacturing to accounting. For these new businesses and services, downtime is not an option that they will be willing to accept and cloud availability SLAs — which only address infrastructure availability — will need to be subsidized with application-level HA. New databases and application systems will require 99.99% availability as an essential requirement.
Existing database and application systems. The predicted boom of everything “At Home” will definitely lead to a spike in new businesses with their new databases, applications and services. But, the rise in these new businesses and upstarts will not mean that existing companies will fold their tents and vacate the space. Instead, the boom of new competitors to the various “At Home” spaces will drive an even greater urgency for existing businesses to fortify their databases and applications. The businesses that exist in this space will need to expand to keep up with competition and growth. As they expand, maintaining high availability will be a key focus for their existing database and application systems as they transition to cloud, hybrid cloud, or a multitude of hosting solutions. These existing applications will neither abandon HA in the current locations, nor consider facing a disaster in any new permutation without high availability and disaster recovery.
IoT Management systems. Not only will these new at home businesses spark growth requiring higher availability, but the shipping industry will continue to expand and generate new systems requiring availability. In fact, whether the prediction of continued work-at-home boom pan out or not, the IoT boom will almost certainly come to fruition. As more customers shop online, ship what was once hand delivered, and require more assistance with their products, and packages these eager and anxious customers will want more ways to track and get updates on the location of the package. As additional checkpoints, check in hubs, and IoT devices are added as mainstays of the new normal the plans will need to include making sure the additional systems are reliable and available to generate the currency of trust for the customer and data for the enterprise.
New Causes for Downtime. As the whole world looks forward to a return to “normal”, this return will generate new challenges and opportunities. Alongside these new technologies, and expanded deployments of database and application 2021 will experience new causes for downtime, old nemesis causing disasters, and other unexpected outages. Applications — even those with more robust monitoring and capabilities — will still experience the old nemesis of coding bugs that lead to crashes or integration issues that lead to instability or hangs. Systems, cloud or on-premise, will still be susceptible to hardware faults, human faults, the occasional simple maintenance that isn’t so simple, and forces like Mother Nature or the new guy with elevated privileges and reduced knowledge. Ushered in with opportunity will be new disasters that require thoughtful approaches to highly available clusters, solutions and services.
Yes, a lot will have changed for companies since things shut down in early 2020, but the new normal that any business returns to will definitely require high availability.
Writers Note: For many families, the post pandemic world will be drastically different with chairs that sit empty, beds that are no longer filled, and laughter and memories that ended in heart-rending pain. To all of these families, SIOS Technology Corp. extends our deepest and most heartfelt sympathies for your loss and our prayers for your comfort and grief.
