Cloud Data Centers - Architectural Drivers

More and more data centers are moving to the cloud. It is estimated that over two-thirds of the data center traffic will be on the cloud by 2017. As per the Cisco Global Cloud Index 2013, Cloud Data Centers are seeing a 35% CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) while the Traditional Data Centers are seeing only a 12% CAGR.

So what are the key drivers for a Cloud Data Center?

• It should provide organizations with Mobility
• It should enable Cloud Management with Security
• It should enable Application Transformation
• And lastly, it should turn Information into Insights to help organizations succeed

Mobility is the key for a Cloud Data Center. Your data should be available wherever you are in any part of the world! It should be safe and secure without any compromise. Management of your data center assets should not turn your hair white. It should be easy to manage, provision, de-provision and backup.

Elaborating a little on Application Transformation - today's applications have attributes like Dynamic Instantiation & Removal, multi-cloud models including hybrid clouds, multiple nodes and have different types of infrastructure demands that were non-existent a few years ago. Today, Infrastructure needs to be application aware for Agile placements, it should identify physical, virtual, cloud integrations, it should be flexible enough for a dynamic shared resource pooling and should be able to manage application clusters.

An optimum data center should give the business an insight into all the critical components of the data center and how each component is helping drive the business. What is the value add of each component and its availability - should be clearly showcased to the business.

So what are the Best Practices for a Cloud Ready Infrastructure?

• Consolidate & document your data center assets
• Develop your data center metrics - Power Utility Efficiency, Operational metrics, People metrics
• Identify & document the data, storage & application network requirements
• Develop & plan your data center architecture - Policies, Automation opportunities, fabric for the implementation
• Plan for the upgrade of your network access & aggregation layers - 10G/40G/100G, unified fabric etc, upgrade of the x86 assets, virtualization & server requirements.
• Identify Day 1, Day 30, Day 60, Day 90 operational requirements
• Plan for how you will deal with Disaster Recovery 
• And finally, develop your cloud management road map! 

Questions to Ask Your Cloud Service Provider...

If you were to sign up for a Cloud Service, be it Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) or Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), what are the questions that you would ask? I have tried to list down most of the questions, however, feel free to be extra cautious and do due diligence before you sign the dotted line!

1. Where will my information be stored? Do I have any control or say in this matter? What are the Security laws in these locations?
2. Can I physically inspect your Cloud operations?
3. Can I get historical data on your Performance Indicators along with historical downtime records?
4. What are the Exit Charges or Penalties if I want to switch to another Cloud Service Provider? Will you delete all the data if I move? How do you prove that all data has been removed from your systems?
5. What are your Disaster Recovery Plans & Policies?
6. What are your Privacy Policies?
7. What types of logs will you provide? Can I get a sample log file? How long do you keep the logs?
8. What are your policies regarding my sensitive data during a legal investigation?
9. What are your up-time SLA's?
10. What types of encryption policies will be implemented?
11. How will my servers be provisioned / decommissioned? 

This does not purport to be a full list of questions but tries to cover the majority of questions that you need answers before you sign-up...

Also posted on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more

Cloud Computing & Business Continuity Planning

Business Continuity Planning (BCP) or Disaster Recovery Planning (DRP) is on the mind of every Enterprise. This can be compared to an Insurance Plan that you or I would buy and companies pay a huge premium to take care of a disaster scenario to ensure that their critical business processes & customers are not impacted or minimally impacted in a disaster situation. From the cloud perspective these days, the critical business processes and systems are very dependent on the Cloud-based applications. BCP involves scoping & planning, conducting a Business Impact Assessment and developing the plan and DRP includes developing the recovery processes, testing them and implementing the disaster recovery processes.

Cloud Computing provides the alternative to an in-house BCP/DRP implementation. You should NOT assume that if you are onto a Cloud Service, you automatically have BCP/DRP. That is a very wrong assumption that many have. In many instances, Cloud platforms do have alternate sites and if one goes down, the availability of your service is automatically served from the alternate site but again, it depends on how the Cloud Service Provider has configured the service!

Your fate is in the hands of the Cloud service provider whose fate is in the hands of..........?

A lot of planning goes into the BCP/DRP with involvement from senior management and key BCP functions / departments. Adopting a cloud strategy for BCP/DRP offers significant benefits to the enterprise without large amounts of capital expenditure and human resources. An enterprise should define their BCP/DRP needs and then carefully evaluate the Cloud Service Provider to ensure that the business needs are met by the provider. A critical issue is the stability and viability of the Cloud Service Provider (CSP). The CSP should be financially strong, technically capable and have the organizational structure & resources to ensure that it will be around when you need it in the short run & the long run!  The CSP should be able to provide secure access from remote locations, distributed architecture, redundancy, geographical dispersion, backup infrastructure, dynamically scalable & storage area networks.

So choose your Cloud Service Provider wisely after doing thorough research so that you are not caught without an umbrella or a rain coat on a sudden rainy day!

Also posted on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more