When the man said to be the heart and soul of the business, The modern company lives or dies on the success of its application.
Most of the business processes within a company backed by powerful business applications; whether taking orders and fulfillment, or ask for vacation. Application problems will usually result in some form of financial losses or productivity.
An application is not durable. Necessary action to rectify mor instance need to patch security, improve the ability of larger, or even integrate entirely new applications. The company continues to make changes to the application environment. Balancing the need to upgrade applications with modern business needs to be 'always-on’ can be a difficult process for companies who do everything possible to avoid downtime application.
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Patch the existing application is by far the company's actions are most often done. While updating existing applications, or applying a new, is a rare occurrence. Regardless of scale, Companies need to ensure that any changes to the application environment will go according to plan, and easy to implement. Testing is paramount here. By applying the changes prior to the non-production environment, IT teams can ensure that they know how to make the process as easy as possible, and ensure that these changes will not have unwanted effects on the production environment.
Traditionally, long downtime during weekends or evenings means of production infrastruksi IT can be used to testing without disturbing the user of the application. however, the growing globalization and the shift towards flexible working hours has changed this. Modern businesses today adopts 24/7, operational always on. Applications should always be available, natural grace period of downtime Companies become lost or no impact anymore. instead, IT teams face the chasm between the need to test and guarantee successful application improvements or other changes and the need for business to continue running.
Skala Two Ends
Although deployment of new applications will always undergo thorough testing, to case patch and upgrade may be less clear. Generally, Companies must make a choice between one of two extremes.
The first is to continue testing with the traditional style taking over the current production environment tested patches or other changes. The IT team can cope with events in the system; the application becomes unable to access to and use of applications during that time. While this will give confidence that the application will behave as expected, but also will result in the period downtime the old. as a result, CIO had to convince companies that the gains of any such change exceeds the actual and potential losses due to lost opportunities and reduced productivity.
The second extreme option is to hold the change with little testing; fix the problem when the application is running (live). While this will result in downtime The shortest of the company, hardly needs to be said that this could easily be a false economy. without testing, is likely to face problems either during or after the launch will increase massively. Cost critical applications that do not go according to plan after the changes may weaken.
To avoid this, Most organizations need to walk in the middle between these extremes, depending on how extreme the changes and how important that business applications. At the end of the scale, small patches likely to be little tested or even be launched with confidence the vendor has tested a whole and the company can quickly view and handle any issues. The company also will maintain the option to launch the application again to the initial patch status (pre patch) or upgrade (upgrade), assuming that if the worst does come to the worst, at least get back to a known and stable configuration.
Where there is a willingness, there is no road
There is no ideal solution. Regardless of the exact route they took, Companies will always trade availability with a calm mind and find a balanced life together. however, This should not be a problem. In less than a decade has been the advances in technology and techniques that allow the company thoroughly test their applications without affecting the availability of their services.
As a start, because the price of storage and servers are becoming increasingly terkomoditas, more affordable to make testing a separate infrastructure where the launch of applications can be enhanced without affecting the production environment. This does not mean investing in separate infrastructure, or other virtual, This is really for testing. for example, Average company will have a large number of unused backup infrastructure that is basically free for exploitation. With modern tools, Companies can reopening (repurpose) as a temporary testing infrastructure; further save the cost of installing a special test environment.
although space (space) not a problem, there are still cases in which to test the infrastructure can spend valuable time for IT teams and requires special expertise. however, This process is a lot more can be automated to a certain extent. For example, Data protection techniques, such as replication and backup (backup) high speed, become much more affordable and accessible to companies; means making replication infrastructure testing as easy as doing a backup. Finally, Companies can quickly prepare the testing infrastructure to any scale, which is identical to the production environment and when they need it. Backup speed also means that the relaunch of the environment for repeatable testing which is a much more simple process.
If companies take advantage of this capability, they will be sure that every app update, revamping or deployment (deployment) has been thoroughly tested before, and have not influenced the IT. Technology makes this process work, that the company needs is the will to make it happen. Therefore, they will find that the gap between belief and availability they need, also they can provide, become smaller.