Ensuring High Availability and Resilience in the ‘Everything App’ Era
The world of social media is changing. Where once social media platforms might have been limited to content sharing, they are starting to evolve into ‘everything apps’, seamlessly blending commerce, banking, content and community into always-on, comprehensive digital ecosystems. As a result, one in five consumers now make purchases through social apps at least once a week. As the role of the social media app changes, so do the expectations of users. It’s one thing not to be able to post a picture of your lunch, it’s a whole other thing not to be able to access your bank account to purchase said lunch from your delivery app. For users to feel confident trusting ‘everything apps’ to replace some of the roles once played by their banks, the apps need to behave like banks – and that starts with resilience.
When even brief outages can significantly impact users, downtime issues can seriously hinder the adoption of these new services, which have yet to prove their mettle outside of social sharing. Many of these social media companies are waking up to the realization that traditional IT operational responses may not be enough to handle the intensity of attacks, disruptions and cloud outages that come with the evolving application landscape. To succeed, these businesses need to protect the integrity of their systems while navigating the evolving infrastructure needs of emerging ‘everything apps’. This critical shift of social media apps becoming “mission-critical” everything apps requires a different approach when it comes to resiliency.
Understanding Infrastructure Strain
To understand the challenge, we need to ask why bad actors choose their targets. Sometimes it’s for prestige, sometimes it’s out of revenge but more often than not, it’s to make money. Whether it’s stealing money (or things with a monetary value, such as passwords or credit-card details), or blackmailing a company by keeping it, or its data, offline until they pay a ransom, money motivates cybercrime.
The challenge for the ‘everything app’ is that now they have… well… everything! Bank details, credit-card details, passwords – the lot. So, they’re suddenly infinitely more attractive to hackers. They also need to connect to more third-party apps, creating additional vulnerabilities.
And this ‘everything app’ data that they have also needs to be treated differently. Some of it is going to be much more sensitive information, which needs to be stored, processed and transferred according to industry regulations.
We’ve already mentioned that uptime needs to be more consistent. But processing time needs to be fast, too. How quickly does a connection request need to be processed? Not very. How quickly does payment authorization need to happen? Almost immediately.
Prioritize Proactive Data Resilience
Welcome to a world hallmarked by compliance and resilience. Overseeing data operations for an organization of any size can be a significant task, and it encompasses a multitude of different service offerings. To do so effectively, there are a few best practices that organizations can adopt. Maintaining high availability (HA) has become table stakes to keep applications accessible during even minor disruptions. However, with complex infrastructures, global footprints and continuity risks within ‘everything apps’, the resiliency of the data needs to be carefully thought through to ensure robust application availability. These platforms can plan for certain architecture disruptions, but there is always a lingering chance for larger unplanned events. By prioritizing proactive data resilience and application resiliency, organizations can set themselves up to withstand unexpected disruptions with little to no downtime.
Streamline Application Resiliency
With millions of user interactions occurring at any given time within apps that try to do it all, comes a demand for active monitoring of health and resource dependencies across storage, computer and network layers. For both on-premises or cloud-based infrastructure, social platforms can utilize automation capabilities to continuously monitor anomalies, automatically detect potential threats and recover data when necessary to ensure resiliency. IT teams can also simplify routine tasks like infrastructure provisioning, application recovery and disaster recovery validation no matter the workload size. By streamlining application resiliency, social platforms can avoid data silos that add even more dysfunction in the event of disaster.
Protection in a Digital-First World
The growing reliance on ‘everything apps’ is shaped by the trend of convenience and shrinking attention among today’s consumers. To meet these new standards and expectations, social media platforms are beginning to encompass a wide variety of services, but this comes with its challenges. Organizations need to adopt a proactive approach to IT and data resilience to protect their brands, maintain trust with their customers and drive revenue. The current and future risks associated with the threat landscape are forcing organizations to evaluate their data resiliency strategies to keep up with increasingly complex infrastructures.
