Are your systems prepared to deal with potential failures in the future?

Our life is tied up with technology, just as it is in businesses. If you think about your company and its main system, imagine what would happen if it stopped working for a whole day or two. Through this insight, José Enrique Rodríguez Huerta, Managing Director of Codurance Spain, began his participation in the Digital Demo of the Digital Enterprise Show 2022 in Málaga.

He then pointed out that the question was not whether or not the system would fail, because it most likely will, but what can be done when it does and how to avoid or mitigate those damages.

One thing is clear: technology needs, risks, costs and complexities grow at the same pace as your business. Therefore, understanding where the most critical vulnerabilities lie within your infrastructure is essential to staying optimized, secure and compliant. 

Three vulnerability areas

• Scalability. You must be able to adapt to changes in demand. If your system can't handle seasonal peaks, like black friday for example if you are a retailer, or you can't predict if it will be able to cope with these volume increases, then you have a scalability problem.

• Cost reduction. Scalability and cost reduction are closely related. To support demand peaks, many companies tend to oversize the capacity of their systems to cope with volume increases. The problem lies in not having the exact capacity required. This inefficiency can be expensive, especially if cost is the key factor in keeping your company competitive.

• Security. Your data is very important, a security breach can make you vulnerable to attacks and you may not be able to recover from it. Investing in the security of your systems, especially if it is what keeps you running, is a must.

Dealing with these complexities is not a simple task, as Rodríguez Huerta explains these problems often have deep roots, requiring a lot of effort and time to find all their layers. But there are some measures that can be taken in this regard and start implementing them as soon as possible. 

Two actions to avoid paralysis and identify pain points

• Continuous improvement programs. It implies a change of mentality in the company, fostering a culture of continuous learning and improvement. Modernization is not a destination, it is a journey we are always on. Even if a problem is solved, there will always be new failures that may appear, and that is why systems must be continuously updated. You have to design a system that is sustainable, that allows you to constantly find improvements and implement them at a cost-effective pace. 

• AWS Well-Architected Framework. Using this framework allows you to assess where you are and draw a path towards the improvements you want to achieve. It is a set of guidelines for you to build future-proof applications and touches on 6 areas that every organization goes through or should take into account: performance efficiency, sustainability, cost optimization, operational excellence, reliability and security.

The Well-Architected Framework Review not only allows you to know where your systems currently stand and get an idea of where you can go within the cloud, but it is also a good way to track your progress towards those goals and improvements.

- José Enrique Rodríguez, Managing Director de Codurance Spain

The presentation ended with this conclusion: it is most likely that your systems will fail at some point, to prevent this and to know how to react you can start doing something today.

Codurance is an AWS Well-Architected Validated partner, enabling us to provide our customers with high-level guidance and best practices to help build and maintain secure, cost-optimized and operationally excellent applications on the AWS Cloud. If you want to identify risks and opportunities in your system, request a review with us and get professional guidance.