With DevOps, Software-as-a-Service and the container craze, businesses are finding it easier than ever to design and deploy applications. But do they know where those applications are running in their infrastructure, their priority in their business, or how much it would cost them if it they stopped working?

Anthony Kessel, director of product management at Sungard AS, a company he said invented the disaster recovery industry, said it’s crucial to know the priority of your applications. He told John Walls and Stu Miniman (@stu), cohosts of theCUBE, from the SiliconANGLE Media team, during EMC World about the “business impact analysis” Sungard AS performs for customers.

Starting with “dependency mapping,” they first find out what applications run on what infrastructure “to let them know that this app, according to everything we found, will cost you $5,000 a minute if it’s down. This app — you could wait three days,” he said.

“If you don’t tier your applications, then you’re either going to spend too much money for things that aren’t needed right away or you’re going to spend too little money and not recover the important things that drive your business,” he explained.

Hybrid the new normal

Kessel tied application tiering for disaster recovery to the need to organize increasingly decentralized, hybrid IT.

“If you look at some of the speeches we’ve had at this general showroom here around putting things where they belong — putting the public stuff in the public cloud, putting the high IOPS stuff local, making sure that’s a hybrid solution. … One of our mottos this year is ‘hybrid is the new normal.'”

He added that Sungard AS uses EMC technologies to protect data and will continue to do so into the future.

Watch the full interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE and theCUBE’s coverage of EMC World 2016.

Photo by SiliconANGLE