A business-critical application is any application that is essential for business continuity. If a business-critical application fails or is interrupted, normal operations of the organization cannot proceed as usual. This is one of the reasons why moving to the cloud has been helpful in addressing many of these hurdles. In this blog post, I’ll let you know to run and secure your critical Apps on Microsoft Azure.
Business Critical vs Mission Critical Applications
There are three main types of classification that ensure organizations can maintain operations even during disasters—mission critical, business critical, and low priority.
- Mission critical: If a mission critical resource suffers downtime, even brief, it can cause massive disruption and lead to negative immediate and long-term negative impacts.
- Business critical: When a business-critical application fails, it can lead to reduced productivity and poor user experience. However, the organization should still be able to function at a basic level for a few hours, without sustaining serious damage to operations and revenue.
- Non-critical or low priority: Organizations classify applications as non-critical when they can continue normal operations for long periods of time without using the application.
70% of decision makers say their companies are actively planning to move, or have already moved, mission-critical systems to the cloud to better meet infrastructure requirements.
Challenges and Opportunities
The top challenges that IT organizations face when managing current mission-critical infrastructures.
It is clear that the move to the cloud has been helpful in addressing many of these challenges. The top benefits some customers have highlighted were:
- Improved security and compliance.
- Revamped performance and latency of mission-critical systems.
- Increased agility (including for modernizing existing systems, developing new capabilities)
- Reduced overall IT costs.
- Faster infrastructure implementation time.
4 Steps to Securing your Business-Critical Applications
There are certain steps and measures you can take to ensure the security of your business-critical applications, including:
- Identify applications that are truly business critical.
- Set up secure strategies for cloud usage.
- Implement secure access measures.
- Reduce risks by setting up lines of defense.
Categories of Critical Applications
- Enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems.
- Data management and analytics applications.
- Backup, and business continuity solutions.
- High-performance computing (HPC) scenarios that exemplify the broadening of business-critical applications that rely on public cloud infrastructure.
Azure’s deep ecosystem addresses the needs of customers in all of these categories and more.
Trust Azure for your Mission-critical Applications and Data
There are several core IaaS capabilities to increase availability, security, scalability, and performance of your mission-critical applications on Azure including the following:
- Azure Dedicated Hosts: More control, flexibility, and choice. Azure customers are now able to schedule platform maintenance operations on Dedicated Hosts and isolated virtual machines (VMs), also they can control when guest OS image updates.
- Higher performance general-purpose and memory-optimized virtual machines: Microsoft has also made recently available new Azure Virtual Machines, featuring Intel Cascade Lake processors, for general purpose and memory-intensive workloads. As a result, Azure now offers a new category of VMs that lowers the price of entry since it does not include a local temporary disk.
- New Disk Storage and networking capabilities enhance security, performance, and availability: New Azure Disk Storage updates, now generally available, include Azure Private Link integration, which enables secure import and export of data over a private virtual network for enhanced security, and support for 512E on Azure Ultra Disks to enable migration of legacy workloads.
- New Linux tools and cost-effective licensing models help manage Linux infrastructure and workloads on Azure: Azure Hybrid Benefit now includes Linux, and together with Azure Image Builder provides new tools and cost-effective licensing models for you to migrate, operate and manage your Linux infrastructure and workloads on Azure.
Get More Information
If you would want to learn how to start your cloud journey, I invite you to check our blog post here. To learn more about the Microsoft vision to run critical Apps on Azure, check the official site here or connect with us here.
