Your software applications, especially those critical to your business operations, must often be running at all times, even when your people are not in the office. Here’s how to assure they always continue running and you always know they are.
Author: Howard M. Cohen
Here’s a compromise you won’t have to think about anymore.
Your business operates Monday through Friday from 9am until 5pm. It may be a large business, or a relatively small one.
At some point, you realized that software would revolutionize your operations. Many of the processes your people were performing could be performed faster and with lower incident of failure by computers running the right software.
You didn’t want to build and operate your own data center, so you chose to run the entire operation on Azure. You made the necessary investments to get everything up and running, and the results have been spectacular.
Let’s Expand This Success!
Everything worked so well, in fact, that you realized you could enjoy even more productivity if you simply let the Azure systems work all the time. Instead of 40 hours per week of far less expensive processing, you could now enjoy 168 with only a modest rise in cost. Great thinking! Great plan!
Nothing succeeds like success, so you started finding other operations which could be expanded to “21-shift” computer operations, seven days a week, three 8-hour shifts per day and not a dollar in payroll beyond the primary 40 hours.
It wouldn’t be long before many of your most critical operations were running at all times. People may arrive in the office at 9am Monday through Friday, but the software just keeps running on Azure. A giant leap in profitability from operations. A fantastic strategy…
Until It Isn’t
One night at around midnight something goes wrong with one of the applications you have running on Azure, and that software grinds to a complete halt.
The good news is that no user is left sitting at their computer waiting for updates from the servers, because they’re all at home sleeping. That’s the upside of a late-night failure.
The downside usually comes the next morning when your people arrive at the office expecting to pick up results from the software and use them to get to work. Since nobody really knew about the failure, all those users are now left with nothing to do. Worse, the problem with the software still exists and you now have to begin figuring out what the problem is. You can feel the time flying by, and you can easily calculate the losses you’re incurring every minute.
You Have Choices to Make
You immediately realize you need to make changes. You need to determine how to keep an eye on your Azure operations at all times, detect problems as they happen, and immediately address them to resolve them before your people come into the office the following morning.
At the very least, you want to know that something went wrong. This challenges your dream of being able to sleep soundly at night knowing your operations are making money while you sleep. You find yourself wanting someone to interrupt your sleep to let you know you have a problem.
Your first thought is to hire someone to stay up all night every night and keep an eye on Azure. Or perhaps you’ll simply select someone from your staff to assign that responsibility to. But none of your staff really have the scope of skills required to detect, evaluate, and remediate Azure problems.
You begin to think about the variety of things that can easily go wrong in any compute environment. There may be a communications problem accessing needed data. There may be a flaw in the software code causing it to fail. There may be a configuration error somewhere. The list goes on. How are you going to find and hire someone to handle all that? And probably two people to cover every night plus all day on weekends. It’s just so unlikely that you’ll find anyone for that job, and even if you did you may be completely unsure of how to compensate and manage them.
Enter Idenxt
Your other option is to engage a service that can address all potential problems your Azure systems may encounter.
That service needs to leverage the best automation tools to accelerate and improve detection, combining it with the expertise of a team of experienced specialists in Azure operations. That’s Idenxt.
Idenxt was created by experts with years of experience managing business-critical applications running on Azure. Once you’ve connected to Idenxt, you’re connected to all their resources, and they keep a careful eye on your Azure applications. Should there be an operational problem, they’ll address it and resolve it immediately. Should there be a problem with your application, they’ll work with your developers to resolve it. Whatever the challenge, Idenxt addresses it instantly.
Only if a problem cannot be resolved before your people arrive at the office in the morning will someone be alerted in the middle of the night. That may be you, or anyone you designate who can take responsibility to prepare everyone for the anomaly. This only happens when the Idenxt team doesn’t have access to the resources required to solve the problem.
Learn More
If you’re running applications at all times and want to assure they continue running, or even if you’re comtemplating expanding computer operations to more than a five-shift schedule, talk to Idenxt today about how we can assure the performance of your mission-critical applications. Contact us here.