A Business after Digital Transformation - Continuous Availability Needed

Congratulations to all the businesses making progress on their digital transformation roadmap.   They have sensors continuously feeding data with the Internet of Things.   Processes are completely automated with minimal or no manual intervention.   Manual entry of data is minimal or nonexistent.   Service and processes are monitored and continuously adjusted either manually or with AI.  

In this type of environment, how do you manage availability of the infrastructure?  Every outage has a direct impact on the business.  Whether an on premise private cloud or a software as a service application, unplanned and planned availability is always an issue and with digital transformation where manual activities have been eliminated or minimized, every outage to one or more of the supporting solutions is an outage to the business.

I am happy to report from the engine room that with proper design and rigorous processes, you can deliver the requisite availability.  From the design aspect, with the virtualization of the underlying infrastructure (network, security, storage, processing, servers etc) we can deliver an extraordinary level of availability with the caveat that service transition is not instantaneous.  It can take up to 15 minutes for your communication packets to find their new destination or for a virtual machine to vmotion.   Secondly, application upgrades or modifications to a data model can involve a painful amount of outage for applications that are not designed with continuous availability in mind.   So far we have talked about design.   Nothing uncovers issues in design or introduces new issues like a poorly managed availability management process.  These are the unplanned outages that are so painful to organizations.    I have introduced one diagram above that shows the kind of availability management processes that a well run applications technology group must follow or suffer the pain of unplanned outages.  I hope you find this information of value.

Your feedback is welcome.