Risk management research has identified threats to IT infrastructure that are almost impossible to predict. These high impact, low probability disasters, dubbed Black Swan events, can bring down IT systems and professional careers. This white paper discusses new approaches to detecting and thwarting Black Swan events and achieving more uptime.

1. Disaster Avoidance vs. Black Swans
The Rise of Real-time Infrastructure Replication as a Service

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First, the Bad News
Building and managing an IT infrastructure is a complex work that is
perpetually in progress. It is relentlessly stress-tested by a continuum of
disruptive technologies, system upgrades, mounting operational
complexities and a torrent of rapidly scaling data.
As a result, today’s IT professionals are being asked to cover infrastructural
and operational territory that continues to expand. For most, the attitude is
“Bring it on!” After all, infrastructure complexity is a reality of the profession.
Unfortunately, it’s not that simple.
Risk management research shows that there are threats that are outside of
our expectations and almost impossible to predict. There are anomalies
that are generally understood and anticipated, but the latest focus in risk
analysis points to the hidden risks of high impact, low probability disasters
— unpredictable Black Swan events. Their unexpected nature makes them
highly dangerous threats to IT infrastructures and professional careers.
Distinguished Professor of Risk Engineering at NYU’s Polytechnic Institute,
Nassim Nicholas Taleb coined the term “Black Swan” to describe
unforeseen occurrences plotted on a bell curve which has thicker tails on
each end. The theory being that more mass in the tails of a probability
distribution implies a greater probability for extreme events occurrences.
As rare but catastrophic outliers, Black Swan events typically trigger a
domino effect that impacts other systems and infrastructures, often with
unpredictable follow-on effects. The 2015 shutdown of the New York Stock
Exchange and the subsequent crash of The Wall Street Journal website
serving as classic examples.
Large enterprises like those named above may be able to weather a Black
Swan event, albeit with a significant hit to their reputation and brand name.
More often than not, however, Black Swan incidents lead to the demise of
medium-sized enterprises.
Yet, a majority of companies today are tempting fate with deficient BC/DR
strategies and legacy technology. IT environments — increasingly global in
nature — are susceptible to these unpredictable events, whether they are
natural disasters or man-made, and are more fragile than their day to day
stability suggests.

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A “Black Swan” refers to the occurrence of events represented
by a bell curve that has thicker tails on each end. If there is
more mass in a tail of a probability distribution, this implies
that extreme events occur with greater probability.

4. IT professionals who are responsible for ensuring the operational integrity
of their company’s IT infrastructure must adopt faster, more advanced,
more resilient BC/DR solutions to minimize the rare but always possible
risks that cannot be anticipated.
Leading companies are migrating from legacy Disaster Recovery
approaches to Disaster Avoidance disciplines and real-time Infrastructure
Replication as a Service (IRaaS). In fact, Infrastructure Replication as a Service
has become a powerful, practical IT utility for avoiding Black Swan events.
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Now, the Good News

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ANTIDOTE TO THE BLACK SWAN

6. The Antidote
What is needed to address the Black Swan problem is a transformational,
unconventional approach. For example, NASA is integrating concepts
from Complexity Science into their engineering process to help preempt
these unwanted outliers. As well, leading BC/DR industry specialists are
designing intelligent systems that can learn from their experience, better
adapt to unforeseen events in their environment, and actually grow
stronger over time.
At the forefront of this effort is real-time Infrastructure Replication as a Service
(IRaaS), a new approach to IT disaster preparedness and avoidance that
combines extremely fast recovery response, new disaster avoidance capabilities
and deep storage retention for regulatory compliance.
Leading solutions are software based, providing real-time replication to semi-
private, private or hybrid cloud architecture designed specifically for disaster
recovery. As such, failover can be initiated in test mode to provide a complete
mirrored infrastructure — including networking — for testing upgrades,
patches and installs. By enabling safer, easier, less costly testing that can be
conducted more frequently, IRaaS becomes an effective deterrent to Black
Swan disasters.
Nowhere are these advances in detecting and preempting Black Swan events
more relevant than in the areas of IT Disaster Avoidance and Recovery.
Forward thinking IT professionals and C- level decision makers are selecting
disaster recovery specialists that are engineering these anti-fragile concepts into
the core of their product strategy, utility and execution. These include the
incorporation of frequent, random testing; the assimilation of incremental
learning capabilities; and a regiment of continuous improvement in
infrastructure safety and system continuity. These disciplines result in increasing
resiliency over time.
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KEY ADVANCED DISASTER
RECOVERY COMPONENTS

8. Real-time Infrastructure Replication as a Service is a superior solution to
reduce the risk of downtime caused by Black Swan events and human
error. Some disaster recovery specialists are even compressing Recovery
Time Objectives (RTOs) to just 2-5 minutes, with failover of entire
virtualized infrastructures, including networking.
Real-time IRaaS offers critical advantages over legacy backup approaches.
• IRaaS dramatically improves the Recovery Time Objectives and Recovery
Point Objectives (RPOs) over traditional physical media backup.
• Even snapshot image-based cloud backup can’t meet the low RTO or
RPO of IRaaS during failover, nor provide smooth failback.
Fully Managed Deep Storage Retention
IRaaS also has the capability for fully managed backup and deep storage
data retention. Not only does this eliminate the cost of your current
backup solution, but ensures long term data protection for compliance,
historical business intelligence and regulatory or legal defense.
This is ideal for highly regulated industries that must comply with the likes
of HIPAA, MPAA, Sarbanes-Oxley and SSAE 16 SOC 11 Audit & Review.
Disaster Avoidance Using Application and Failover Testing
IRaaS provides advanced disaster avoidance using application and failover
testing that can benefit IT in several ways:
• IT professionals can failover in test mode to create a mirrored “sandbox”
to test upgrades, patches and new applications well in advance of
pushing to a production environment. This feature could have
prevented the problems at the New York Stock exchange and the
ensuing damage to brand reputations and revenues that pushed some
traders to other exchanges.
• IRaaS enables a test failover of the complete mirrored infrastructure
without affecting the production environment or interrupting
replication. This failover testing can be provided as an inclusive service
on a regular basis for customers.
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Infrastructure Replication as a Service

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Purpose-Built Disaster Recovery Cloud
When choosing a cloud infrastructure in which to point your replication,
there are great differences in the options. Large public clouds may seem
attractive but it’s important to note the specific limitations of each, such
as format, failback restrictions and control of resources. A purpose-built
disaster recovery cloud is essentially a semi-private cloud specifically
designed for higher performance and higher resiliency than a standard
production hosting cloud environment.
Point-in-Time Journaling
Some IRaaS providers have the capability to provide Point-in-Time
Journaling that enables recovery to be initiated from a time weeks or
months prior to a failover event. This allows instant recovery from a time
known to have a stable infrastructure, while the recent problem can be
addressed.
Highly Available Geo-Redundancy
It’s not enough to simply co-locate your disaster recovery infrastructure
offsite. Look for disaster recovery providers that have designed disaster-
resiliency into everything from architecture to location selection. Make
sure that disaster recovery data centers are based in areas where natural
disasters are a low probability.
Multi-Vendor Solutions
Advances in protection from Black Swan events are moving quickly and
it’s smart to partner with a provider that can advise about and provide
best-of-breed supporting technology. This avoids being locked in to the
provider’s proprietary solution, which creates clear biases in advising
customers’ on DR solutions for their architecture.
Customer Support
Choose a disaster recovery provider that provides excellent customer
support and engineer-level response on the first call. It is unacceptable to
navigate through tiers of support to speak with an engineer at the onset
of a failover emergency.
OPEX Pricing
IRaaS provides monthly OPEX-based pricing that eliminates the need for
costly CAPEX investments, keeping company resources focused on your
core capabilities instead of depreciating assets.

10. As goes a company’s IT uptime performance, so goes the company. When
systems crash, careers and brand reputations are tarnished, client loyalty is
damaged and market value plunges. And with this reality comes increasing
pressure on the IT team and C-level leaders to minimize downtime and
uncover potential disasters like Black Swan catastrophes before they strike.
Unfortunately, the available solutions to protect infrastructure and ward off
unconventional threats — redundant hot-sites and high-availability
replication — have been beyond the budgets of most organizations.
With new learnings gleaned from the likes of NASA and the emergence of
new technologies like IRaaS, however, advanced testing and disaster
avoidance capabilities are now available to Enterprise, mid-market and
SMBs.
While Black Swan disasters will by their very nature continue to be elusive
and difficult to predict, advanced Infrastructure Replication as a Service
providers like Assuritive can provide forward-thinking organizations with
every means to identify outlier threats and halt their advance.
Assuritive is an industry leading provider of Infrastructure Replication as a
Service (IRaaS). Founded by leaders in IT infrastructure monitoring,
management and digital ecosystem strategy, Assuritive applies automated
intelligence methodologies for increasingly resilient system design in
DRaaS Cloud architecture, operations and capabilities.
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Conclusion