High Availability Isn’t Just for the Big Boys Anymore

The cloud is still a long way from mass SMB (small and medium-sized business) adoption, but recent IDC research indicates that SMBs will contribute 40% of worldwide public cloud spending by 2019.

As of 2016, research shows that both SMBs and enterprises are deploying hybrid clouds—but it’s SMBs that are focusing their efforts on public cloud, with 53% of them running the majority of their cloud workloads on public platforms.

The problem with the SMB shift to the public cloud is that companies must balance a need for high application availability with cost-saving concerns. Luckily, high availability is no longer reserved for large enterprise customers.

Downtime Challenges Make High Availability Solutions Necessary

High availability is all about making your cloud networking as resilient as possible - protecting your cloud applications from interruptions and potential outages that disrupt business.

SMBs may feel they don’t need advanced high availability solutions because they aren’t placing the same demands on their AWS deployments as their enterprise counterparts.

However, the following common causes of cloud application failure can happen to companies of any size, making high availability a necessity:

• Human Mismanagement
  Much like in the world of cybersecurity, human error is the leading cause of cloud application failure. Whether public cloud workloads are heavy or minimal, a cloud application can only maintain uptime when managed properly.

• Failure with Applications Themselves
  Like any other application, SMBs must stay on top of continuous testing for their public cloud applications to stay up.

• Security Incidents
  The public cloud brings with it many security concerns—but like most other technologies, people are setting those concerns aside in favor of feature-rich public cloud platforms. If a DDoS attack can bring a standard application down, it can do the same for cloud applications.

These are just 3 of many potential causes for application downtime. Without a high availability solution in place, SMBs face significant revenue loss and customer dissatisfaction in the face of potential application downtime.

Making Key Elements of High Availability Storage Afforadable 

Avoid Data Loss (aim for recovery point objective equal to zero)

Rapid Recovery (recovery time objective should be less than 60 seconds)

Integrated Solution (shouldn’t depend on external software)
Automated Setup and Failover
Simple Monitoring and Management
Support for Non-Disruptive Management

Traditional high availability storage options, with all of these features, have used costly, clustered storage area networks that only highly-trained enterprise IT staff could actually manage. 

A proper SMB-focused high availability storage solution is made with the following benefits for cost-effectiveness:

• Thin-Provisioning
  Flexible disk storage space allocation, depending on minimum necessary space per user.
• Compression
  Identify redundancies within files and eliminate them to save storage space.
• Deduplication
  Eliminate redundancies across all files in the storage system.
• Pay as You Go Pricing for Storage

High availability is a necessity for many SMB cloud users—and now, the Cloud Volumes ONTAP™ (formerly ONTAP Cloud) from NetApp can make enterprise-ready high availability storage economically feasible for SMBs.

To learn more about how Cloud Volumes ONTAP High Availability on AWS works, click here or watch NetApp's on-demand webinar, Achieving High Availability in the Cloud.

Want to get started? Try out Cloud Volumes ONTAP today with a 30-day free trial.