There is so much in our world that changes. Whether that change is gradual or immediate, it is inevitable. Therefore, instead of fighting the change, it is important to focus your efforts on managing it.

Change management, the process of requesting, approving, validating logging changes to systems, has become the leading key information security component that betters and maintains high availability systems.

It brings significant benefits to an organization. Change management increases the effectiveness of the decision-making proficiency of an organization by training personnel to think about and evaluate changes before early. Moreover, it provides a knowledge base of past changes and the lessons learned from situations.

The Impact of Change Management

Information security can get divided into three main components: confidentiality, integrity, availability, CIA triad. The most important of the three is availability, as the data must at all times be accessible to accredited users when they need it. With change management, high availability gets met. Here are a series of reasons why organizations should apply change management.

1. Any change can create new vulnerabilities or reduce the availability of systems. Therefore, organizations must balance the demand for change while minimizing unwanted and disadvantageous risks. The answer to balancing is change management.
2. Change management systems will necessitate changes to be requested in a system and then approved by authorized individual/s. The process of requesting a change and supporting it validates the actions taken.
3. Change management can aid in knowledge management and reverse any adverse changes. It can also assist in knowledge management objectives because the intent behind changes and those who supervise it get stored in the system.
4. Change management allows an organization to reverse adverse changes by keeping a log of actions taken. There may be occurrences that changes do not supply the desired outcomes; thus, organizations must have a technique of reversing the changes to bring the system back to a functioning state. Change management will enable users to view the log of actions taken to undo these actions.

Change management systems should manage changes that are associated with the entire life of a cycle, including design, development, testing, implementation, alongside its distribution and ongoing maintenance. It holds tremendous benefits, which organizations will realize when tracking minor changes.

What Is High Availability?

It is a concept that involves eliminating single points of failure to ensure that if one of the components, such as a server, fails, the service would still be up and accessible. It enables an organization’s IT infrastructure to continue functioning even when some components fail.

High availability is crucial for mission-critical systems, as it mitigates service disruption that would otherwise result in additional expenses or financial losses. Although the concept does not eliminate the threat of service disruption, it affirms that the IT team has taken critical steps to secure business continuity.

Lastly, high availability suggests there is no room for failure. Everything from the organization’s load balancer, firewall, and router to businesses’ reverse proxy and monitoring systems is completely redundant at network and application levels that guarantee the highest service availability.

Its advantages lie in reducing downtime, SLA being next to 100%, continuity of service guaranteed at all times, high-level performance, and enhanced data security.

If you’re an organization and wondering if you need to invest in High availability infrastructure, you might be in need if you suit the following scenarios:

1. You are dealing with critical application management on a day-to-day basis.
2. You are managing a website that manifests high traffic volumes.
3. You cannot afford any downtime.
4. Your business’ worst nightmare is interruptions of service.
5. One of your company goals is assuring high performance.
6. Lastly, one of your critical missions as an organization is to ensure good service that is always accessible.

All these get achieved through High Availability, which is aided dramatically with Change Management.

Examples of Companies That Employ High Availability?

Each of the following companies relies on providing a service or product people can depend upon. From their marketing tactics to the value they provide, high availability is absolutely essential to allow these businesses to thrive:

1. Netflix
2. Pinterest
3. Coca-Cola
4. Vivino
5. Kroger
6. Gameloft
7. Etsy
8. eBay
9. Twitter
10. Paypal

Why Is High Availability So Important in Today’s Economy?

When we tackle high availability, it refers to a system or competition that has been continuously up and running for a pleasingly long time. 100% operating, always running, and a system never fails.

High availability in today’s economy provides three main benefits.

1.   Effective Money Saving Tactic

The most common culprit of downtime is hardware failure, in addition to upgrades and migration. The hourly cost of downtime, or the money lost for an organization, can range from $8,580.99 for a small business to $686,250 for a large company.

If you’re employing highly available infrastructure, you won’t be dealing with potential losses as high as almost $700,000, even in case of downtime or outrage.

2.   Provides enhancement of business reputation, customer satisfaction, and loyalty

Try to illustrate a business that revolves around the banking industry. A few seconds of downtime can cause massive destruction for clients, trading, and consumers. A good amount of lawsuits can also arise, even.

In today’s global online economy, a business’s IT end-users, and customers appeal for 24/7 unfailing swift access to applications. Given these high stakes, it should be no surprise that business continuity and disaster recovery are becoming top concerns for organizations of all types and sizes.

3.   Investing in fault-tolerant hardware rather than traditional server clustering is proven to be a more long-term, highly operational, and cost-effective solution.

Almost 70% of best-in-class organizations use fault-tolerant servers and software fault-tolerant solutions to provide High availability. Whole cost meters for these types of hardware are substantially high, the complexity of implementation and level of human interaction after a collapse or deterioration is very low. It implies that operational and management costs are still considered low on average.

When you compare it to traditional high availability server clustering, all critical factors involved, namely initial purchase price, the complexity of implementation, and level of human interaction after failure, are all increased. In addition to this, the failover cluster instance itself does not secure data protection, which would heighten the risk of data loss that will bear another cost altogether.

Conclusion

Change management remains the key component of information security when it comes to maintaining high availability systems. For maintaining high availability in all of your business systems, rely on Run2Biz to provide the solutions for your business needs.