In today’s fast-paced, always-on world, businesses are not only being evaluated on their customer service levels and what they sell, but increasingly on their response times. With more and more consumers accessing cloud services from portable devices that are connected to both the network and the services they want, businesses can no longer afford the revenue and reputational impact of downtime.

Even if it’s not direct to the end user, more than ever availability has become a determining factor when it comes to business success.  For instance should Twitter or Facebook not be available, it may frustrate and annoy regular users, however it would prove disastrous for companies trying to selling advertising space on these platforms.

Media reports continue to highlight high profile IT outages and the resultant damage to the organisation’s financial, reputational and customer service goals. Here it is advisable that organisations consider investing in options that offer the benefits of cloud computing without the risks.

In the past it has been security concerns that have been the overriding factor preventing organisations from moving to the cloud. However it is now availability that is the greatest concern when it comes to the improved agility and economics that come with using a cloud infrastructure.  Here cloud applications need to be designed to work around potential failures with code needing to be rewritten to make existing applications “cloud-ready”.

However this is not the only solution. Organisations now have access to software defined availability via a software layer that makes decisions about where an application should run. This ultimately provides organisations with the right level of availability at the right time, per workload, helping them to take advantage of the elastic nature of cloud.

Going forward, while migrating to a cloud environment may not be immediately on the cards for some organisations, they should regardless ensure that their availability solution provides for always-on computing, with easy deployment to make this transition as smooth as possible. Here opting for a solution that allows for software-defined availability will serve to bypass traditional barriers.