Every organisation wants to be resilient.
No CIO wants to explain an outage.
No IT team wants to scramble through a recovery that doesn’t work.
And no business wants to discover at the worst possible moment that their “redundancy” was more theoretical than real.
But the challenge is that Resilience can get expensive - fast. And in many organisations, resilience investments are either misaligned, underutilised, or overly engineered.
The goal isn’t to eliminate risk. The goal is to right-size it - building enough resilience to withstand the most likely disruptions without spending money on insurance you’ll never use.
For 2025 and beyond, that balance has become one of the most important priorities for hybrid cloud strategy.
Resilience Has Evolved - And So Have the Risks
Traditional resilience planning focused on infrastructure failures, data centre outages, and hardware redundancy. That world still exists, but the risk surface has dramatically expanded.
Today’s IT teams face resilience pressures that didn’t exist a few years ago:
- Vendor-driven SaaS changes
- Public cloud outages
- Supply chain delays
- Cyber incidents
- Latency-sensitive AI workloads
- Sovereignty requirements
- Cost blowouts from unplanned consumption
- Skills and staffing constraints
You can’t build perfect protection against everything. But you can build the right level of protection where it matters most.
Not All Workloads Need the Same Level of Resilience
One of the biggest causes of overspending is assuming every workload needs:
- Active-active infrastructure
- Full redundancy
- Multi-cloud failover
- Real-time replication
- Instant recovery
Most don’t.
Some workloads genuinely require high availability because downtime has real business impact. Others can tolerate slower recovery or periodic disruption without hurting operations.
Smart resilience planning starts by asking:
1. What is the business impact of this workload going offline?
If the answer is “immediate financial or operational loss,” it needs higher resilience.
If the answer is “mild inconvenience,” it probably doesn’t.
2. How fast does this workload need to come back?
RTO and RPO aren’t just technical metrics - they’re cost drivers.
3. Does this workload have regulatory, sovereign, or compliance considerations?
Some workloads must be protected; some workloads can be protected.
4. Are we paying for redundancy we’re not actually using?
Many organisations build resilience into places where it delivers minimal value.
Right-sized resilience avoids both extremes: under-protecting high-value workloads and over-engineering low-value ones.
Single Points of Failure Still Exist - Just in New Places
Even in hybrid environments, many organisations still have unrecognised risks hidden in:
- Managed service provider dependencies
- Single cloud provider regions
- SaaS upgrade cycles
- Network links for remote sites
- Storage arrays approaching end-of-life
- Legacy databases that can’t move
- Analytics workloads tied to specific proprietary services
These aren’t traditional infrastructure risks - they’re architectural risks.
And they require a resilience strategy that can flex across SaaS, public cloud, private infrastructure, and specialised platforms.
Where Specialised Platforms Fit In
Some workloads have zero tolerance for unpredictability.
These are the transactional, high-performance, or mission-critical systems that keep the business moving.
Platforms like IBM Power Systems and IBM Storage are often used in these scenarios because they provide:
- High reliability
- Predictable performance
- Enterprise-grade redundancy
- Strong governance and control
- Sovereignty options
- Long lifecycle stability
These aren’t luxuries - they’re requirements for workloads where resilience can’t be compromised.
They form part of a balanced hybrid strategy, ensuring the “steady, mission-critical core” remains protected while more elastic workloads take advantage of cloud agility.
Resilience Without Waste: What It Looks Like
A right-sized resilience strategy typically includes:
1. Tiered protection levels
Critical workloads get high availability.
Important workloads get rapid recovery.
Low-value workloads get economical recovery.
2. Redundancy that’s intentional, not assumed
Every layer of redundancy has a purpose - and a cost.
3. Hybrid models designed around tolerance, not paranoia
Not every workload needs multi-cloud failover.
Not every outage requires instant switchovers.
4. Regular, practical testing
Backups that aren’t tested aren’t backups.
Resilience that isn’t validated isn’t resilience.
5. Governance that includes cloud vendors, not just IT
Many failures come from changes introduced outside your environment.
The most resilient organisations aren’t the ones spending the most. They’re the ones spending wisely - aligning protection levels with real-world business impact.
The Bottom Line: Resilience Isn’t About More - It’s About Right-Sizing
Building resilience isn’t about creating a fortress.
It’s about designing an environment that:
- Protects what matters most
- Avoids unnecessary cost
- Responds quickly to change
- Adapts to new risks
- Balances redundancy with efficiency
- Ensures the business keeps moving - without overspending
Most mid-market IT teams don’t need more resilience. They need the right resilience.
A Framework for Making Resilience Decisions With Confidence
Many organisations rely on a combination of SaaS platforms, global cloud services, private infrastructure, and specialised environments as part of a balanced resilience model. These platforms underpin the stability side of hybrid strategy while enabling agility where it’s safe.
If you want practical guidance on how to right-size resilience across your environment, our latest eBook, “Future-Proofing Your Cloud Strategy in an Era of Uncertainty” outlines exactly how to do it.
Download it now to learn:
- How to tier workloads by business impact
- How to match resilience strategies to each classification
- How to spot hidden points of failure
- How to avoid overspending on redundant architecture
- How to design resilience that keeps pace with evolving risks
