The attractiveness of the cloud
May 13, 2012
In order to enable organisations to compete effectively in this demanding marketplace, chief information officers (CIOs) are looking for increasing levels of performance from their infrastructure. At the top of their lists are ways to make infrastructure more dynamic, resilient and to take advantage of virtualisation, which itself is changing the traditional computing model.
Cloud computing offers a way to achieve many of these goals and is increasingly becoming part of corporate strategies.
As a model for consuming and delivering infrastructure, the cloud enables self-service, different sourcing options and significant economies of scale. It’s also clear that organisations will use a combination of private and public clouds to achieve their goals…
When it comes to backup, cloud has many attractions for CIOs, who face the challenge of increasing volumes of data and static IT budgets, allied to growing requirements to keep vital data and the systems it runs on available. In other words, traditional backup which protects the data is no longer sufficient. Complete IT resilience is essential because without it, very few organisations can survive for extended periods.
Cloud-based backup occurs off-site and reduces the need to do tape back-ups.
Caveat emptor
The old Latin tag, “buyer beware,” is particularly relevant here because many services that are marketed as disaster recovery are actually nothing more than offsite data copies. That is, they replicate data but not the systems, on which the data, applications, configurations and operating systems reside on. Data replication is no longer acceptable for most businesses. In today’s global economy it is expected from organisations to be 100% available at all times.
By contrast, a true disaster recovery mirrors the entire system as well as providing the infrastructure on which to bring up the systems. A cloud-based solution will leverage the syndication of such systems which the service provider can offer due to multiple customers that share the same infrastructure.
A complete disaster recovery solution as described above is costly. It requires large volumes of data to be copied across the public Internet or via a private WAN link. A lot of bandwidth is required to ensure the recovery point objective (RPO) remains at acceptable levels and the solution is reliable.
It is also important to optimise data replication by using compression devices, selective replication and incremental copies.
Prioritising data and systems for replication is thus key, and to do so one must understand the organisation’s risk profile and to identify critical data and system. To prioritise effectively, it is critical to perform a risk assessment as well as business impact and infrastructure impact analyses.
Once this homework has been done, and users have a full understanding of the hierarchy of data and systems in relation to business criticality, then the business recovery plan can be created. And as part of this business recovery plan, cloud’s flexibility and ability to reduce costs will likely be an attractive solution.