Last year was a trying one for Cloud Computing. While positioned as a game changing revolution for IT, most of the talk instead focused on some of the numerous high profile Cloud outages that affected scores of businesses and their customers. This has only aided to a growing concern that, while useful for non-core applications, Cloud Computing is simply not a safe or secure way for a business to store their mission critical applications and vital data.
Certainly, the Cloud has the potential to offer massive benefits to organisations; the advantages of Cloud Computing have been talked up to the point of excess. Reduced costs, increased automation and simplified IT are just some of the expected benefits organisations have been told again and again that can be achieved if they take that first step to the cloud. But perhaps in light of recent events, the most compelling case to put forward for Cloud has been around data accessibility and recoverability.
The fact that services can be affected by internet failure should not be used as an excuse for downtime – indeed, the idea that any single point of failure could exist within an organisation’s IT infrastructure should be of greater concern. Business’ customers won’t care the reasons behind why their orders haven’t been made - they want to be reassured their vital data is always accessible.
No single point of failure = increased resilience
The knock on effect from recent high profile Cloud outages have meant the issue of trust is impacting on the c-level. The executives who make the decision or hold the purse-strings are becoming concerned about moving their infrastructure into the cloud, and with good reason.
Customers should be careful to avoid the mistake of insisting their data is secure, when they actually mean insisting their data is always available. A truly resilient Cloud environment has to incorporate the ability to failover from more than one separate enterprise-grade Cloud to another. Moreover, there must be multiple routes of connection to the outside world – what good is a resilient Cloud infrastructure if no-one can access it? Businesses should ensure that if their data needs to fail-over to a secondary site, the Cloud provider has enough surplus resources within a second infrastructure to manage the huge increase in traffic and still be able to make data available to all their customers, not just the most ‘important ones’.
While the new breed of Cloud providers have focused on selling the benefits of the cloud, it’s evident that for many organisations to truly realise these, tough questions need to be asked about the security and availability record of a Cloud provider, before they are entrusted with an organisation’s data and infrastructure. Businesses absolutely have to know if they are able to get their data back, or indeed if the ability to transfer their data from a Cloud vendor back in-house, or to another vendor in the future exists.
How can businesses ensure the resilience and security of the data stored in the cloud?
Despite painting a bleak picture, by simply following a few best-practice guidelines businesses can be assured that their data is more resilient and secure in the Cloud than ever before:
- Don’t treat data availability as an afterthought. For some Cloud providers, availability is an after-thought as they address the cost induced benefits of moving to the cloud. Make sure you challenge your provider on whether they’re offering a true Cloud or just a bunch of virtualized servers.
- Make sure you know if your Cloud is truly an enterprise-class cloud. What happens when, as we’ve seen numerous times recently, there’s a major outage or security breach? Getting your data back quickly isn’t a given. Enterprises need Cloud vendors with resilience in their DNA.
- Technology is complex and problems can happen to anyone – operational and security related. If you are going to put sensitive company information, or mission critical business processes under someone else’s management you need to know them, their IT operation and their future strategy very well.
- Define and communicate the security, resilience and costing procedure right from the start. Any successful Cloud project that protects itself from outages should have these ingrained into the very fabric of the solution.
- Understand that even as a technology issue, senior management might want to be convinced every step of the way and naturally have some key concerns around security, performance and overall cost, not least from the CFO’s perspective. Addressing issues relating to Cloud and data availability is as much about cultural and internal thinking as technology.
- Highly resilient clouds aren’t just for large enterprises. It’s perfectly possible and affordable to have a secure, resilient shared Cloud environment – without the expense of your own data centres or staff to operate them – but still knows exactly where your data is stored and your applications are running.
CIOs, understandably, are reluctant to let go of their most important data to a third party - who can blame them? Many of the major Cloud vendors – particularly public Cloud – have only a couple of years’ experience in managing and securing vital customer information. When you couple this with the spate of outages affecting Cloud services we’ve seen over the past 12 months it’s understandable there is a reluctance to part with the life-blood of the organisation.
In essence, be it in the Cloud or not, the platform your data is delivered on or stored in is irrelevant if it’s not resilient. If your data’s not available, it’s no use to you. If organisations are savvy about the choices they make and ask the right questions, there is a great chance everyone from the IT Administrator to the CEO will be on board, safe in the knowledge that with the Cloud in place, relationships with customers and key stakeholders will only become stronger.
Keith Tilley is UK managing director and executive vice president for Europe, SunGard Availability Services.
