The Challenge
Why Applications Go Down
Outages rarely have one cause. Single points of failure, limited monitoring and untested recovery all add up to downtime users notice first.
Is This Relevant?
Is This Use Case Relevant to Your Organization?
The people, moments and signals that usually bring this need to the surface.
Relevant Teams
- Application and service owners
- IT operations and support
- Customer-facing business teams
Common Triggers
- A significant outage or slowdown
- Rapid growth in users
- Customer or contract availability requirements
Warning Signs
- Repeated incidents on the same systems
- Outages discovered by customers or staff
- No agreed availability targets
Typical Environments
- Public cloud, in one or more providers
- Hybrid environments with cloud-hosted services
Benefits
What Better Looks Like
Intended benefits. Actual results depend on your environment and starting point.
Our Approach
A Practical Approach
A cycle of design, testing and improvement, so resilience keeps pace with change. Each stage is tailored to your environment.
Assess
Review architecture, past incidents, monitoring and recovery arrangements.
Prioritize
Rank what you find by business impact, effort and risk, and agree where to start.
Design
Agree availability targets and the design patterns for each service.
Implement
Apply design changes, monitoring and automation in planned stages.
Validate and Optimize
Test failover and recovery, and check performance under load.
Solutions
Solutions That Can Help
The solutions that address this use case, starting with the primary one.
Services
How Signisys Can Support You
The services that deliver the approach, from the first assessment to ongoing improvement.
Technology
Technology Options
Where technology fits in the approach. Specific platforms and partner status are confirmed for each engagement.
Before You Start
What to Consider Before Getting Started
A little preparation makes the first assessment faster and its findings more reliable.
- Availability targets for each application
- Dependencies between applications and data
- Current monitoring and on-call arrangements
- The cost of redundancy against the cost of downtime
- Who will own the work and act on recommendations
- Engagement model and ongoing support
Measuring Success
How to Measure Success
Illustrative measures. Agree a baseline first, and keep targets separate from measured results.
Availability
The share of time each application is available.
Incident Frequency
How often outages or slowdowns affect users.
Time to Detect
How quickly problems are noticed.
Time to Restore
How quickly service is restored after a failure.
Our Approach
How We Deliver Results
How Signisys works, from the first assessment to handover and beyond.
FAQs
Frequently Asked Questions
Common questions about this use case.
How do we know our availability needs improving?
Repeated outages, problems reported by users before IT knows, and no agreed availability targets are the usual signs. A review of past incidents and the current design shows where to start.
Does improving availability mean doubling our costs?
Not necessarily. Redundancy is applied where the business impact of downtime justifies it, and monitoring and recovery improvements often cost little.
What information is needed to get started?
A list of critical applications, past incidents, current architecture and monitoring, and any availability commitments to customers.
Which environments does this apply to?
Public cloud, in one or more providers, and hybrid environments.
How is progress measured?
Agree a baseline for measures such as availability, incident frequency, time to detect and time to restore, then track them over time.
Related Content
Related Outcomes, Use Cases and Guides
Where to go next: the outcome this use case supports, nearby scenarios, technology partners and practical guides.
Business Outcome
Improve IT Reliability and Business Continuity
Technology Partner
AWS Solutions and Services
Problem Explainer
What Causes Application Downtime? Common Problems and Warning Signs
Coming soon
How-To Guide
How to Improve Application Uptime and Availability: A Practical Step-by-Step Guide
Coming soon
Checklist
Improve Application Uptime and Availability Checklist: What IT Teams Should Assess
Coming soon
Decision Guide
How to Choose the Right Approach to Improve Application Uptime and Availability: Options and Trade-Offs
Coming soon
Keep Applications Running
Share your current challenges and priorities with Signisys to explore an approach suited to your environment.