Aside from numerous businesses failing over the past 18 months, one of the painful symptoms of the crises of our pandemic times has been the many failures of digital transformation.
Widely regarded as the silver bullet for business continuity, digitalising processes can be one of the most complex challenges enterprises face.
Implement the process successfully, and the business gains massive resilience. But it does not necessarily become agile, and that means it is slow to react when things go wrong.
If one really wants to understand how resilient a large company is in troubled times, ask C-level executives if they have a disaster recovery strategy: a structured approach that documents and guides how an organisation will resume work after an unplanned crisis. Think cyber breach, floods, riots, or sudden lockdown.
It is known formally as Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery (BCDR). By now, one would expect it to be a central business tool. Instead, it has had to wait in line as companies struggle merely to keep the lights on, since it is not a cheap or quick exercise. It typically requires software and operations to run in a variety of cloud environments, in what is known as a multicloud strategy. It can also be deployed across both the public cloud, namely shared platforms accessible via the internet, and the private cloud, dedicated to a specific organisation - a hybrid cloud strategy.
Naturally, the systems to enable it are complex. Or, at least, they used to be.
Last month, one of the world leaders in cloud software took a step closer to providing a disaster recovery solution that could, almost at the push of a button, get a business up and running again.
Nutanix, a US company that prides itself on "making clouds invisible" to "free customers to focus on their business outcomes", in effect acknowledged that it had too many solutions. At its annual Next conference, new CEO Rajiv Ramaswami declared that the company was simplifying its portfolio from more than 15 products to five key solutions.
The most significant of these is a ground-breaking feature of the Nutanix Cloud Platform and the company's own cloud operating system, AOS 6, which speeds up multicloud deployments. The combination provides access to new BCDR capabilities that had previously been found only in specialised solutions. Now, it is built into a standard AOS 6 implementation, and enables automatic "failover" in the event of a disaster.
In effect, this is plug-and-play disaster recovery.
Mindful of how vulnerable a company can be to further cyber breaches when its systems go down, it includes end-to-end encryption capabilities for disaster recovery traffic. A disaster recovery dashboard provides a comprehensive view of BCDR configuration and status.
These capabilities, says Nutanix, enable enterprises to eliminate specialised disaster recovery hardware and software, reduce licensing costs, improve recovery time, simplify operations and potentially eliminate expensive standby sites.
Even midsize companies, which might not have had the budget or skills to implement robust disaster recovery, will be able to use it.
"Due to the integrated nature of the Nutanix Cloud Platform, all functionality is managed through a single interface, significantly decreasing operational overhead," said Ramaswami.
"Our goal here is to make it simple for our customers and partners to leverage our solutions to help achieve their business outcomes. Our simplicity and ease of use have always been hallmarks of why our customers appreciate us. They love the one-click simplicity that we bring to all things complex."
The ultimate goal, he says, is to "offer a single console to view and manage your hybrid cloud deployments".
Information technology veterans would probably be sceptical of all the "one-click" and "single-console" talk, but a demonstration during the keynote revealed just how simple cloud deployment can be.
Laura Jordana, principal technical marketing engineer at Nutanix, joined Ramaswami on stage to demonstrate how Nutanix Clusters, a product that promises to enable seamless hybrid cloud deployments, can be used to deploy a company's virtual data centre on the Amazon Web Services platform in just 45 minutes.
That may not be the push of a button but, for a process that used to take between six and nine months, it comes close to instant.
• Goldstuck is founder of World Wide Worx and editor-in-chief of Gadget.co.za
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