The cloud is great, unless your service goes down or the access is too slow. Some of this can’t be helped. You are, after all, relying on a world-wide network built on the backs of thousands upon thousands of providers. The Internet may never be 100 percent predictable.
When cloud services go down, it makes headlines. Amazon has borne the biggest brunt, being perhaps the largest supplier aimed at business. Microsoft has also had a few oops with Hotmail and Azure.
While the vendors suffer bad press, customers suffer downtime and in some cases lost data. Fortunately there are steps you can take to minimize these cloud risks. A recent report in Computerworld has four areas of advice.
Here are four areas Computerworld author Bart Perkins points to.
- Resiliency: Enterprises looking for true resiliency may want to consider using more one cloud provider for mission critical applications. “Your enterprise architecture must also be designed for resiliency. Typical approaches involve spreading business functions, data and other assets across the cloud world. Most enterprises separate entities geographically within a single provider's cloud. The truly paranoid may want to spread their assets across multiple cloud providers,” Perkins wrote.
- Providers: Perkins argues that you shouldn’t let your provider act entirely independent. Instead “a cloud provider should be managed, monitored and measured like other critical IT suppliers,” he argued. “Begin by setting clear performance goals with well-defined metrics. Assign staff to monitor performance and manage the supplier relationship.”
- Managing expectations: Perkins believes that while those in IT understand the cloud is like any other piece of infrastructure and can possibly go down, business executives aren’t as understanding. These executives “want ‘dial-tone reliability, like the service provided by the old Bell system. But that's a standard that cloud suppliers can't meet now and are unlikely to fulfill anytime soon. And even if cloud vendors do one day offer dial-tone reliability, it would likely carry a premium price tag and would be cost-effective only for high-end products,” Perkins noted.
- Customers: If you think business management is angry when the cloud service goes down, listen in on a few customer complaints. To keep these folks from becoming ex-customers prepare for such problems. “Your customer service staff's response must be sympathetic, informative and timely. When outages occur or service levels are significantly hampered, acknowledge the issue, apologize profusely, post status updates regularly, and share preventative measures as they are developed,” Perkins said.
I, Doug Barney, your faithful reporter have some advice of my own from years of covering the cloud.
- Before choosing a provider, do your research. Once you’ve narrowed down the candidates, then comes the real work. You need to interrogate these providers, asking about their business, their infrastructure, security and company stability.
- Security, and data leakage is a big area to explore. Since the data is no longer in your hands, you want to know how exactly admins at the cloud provider handle data.
- Keeping data from leaking in one thing, preventing it from disappearing is another. Here you want to what the backup and restore policies are, what tools they use, and how long it takes for a restoration.
- For smaller providers, if at all possible, look at the provider’s books so you can gauge their long-term viability. Lock-in is another issue to explore. How do you migrate off a provider who goes under or has poor service?
- Most clouds are multitenant. Since your data is on the same servers as other customers and in some cases even contained in the same VM, how is all this data protected from the other clients?
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
