Critical parameters to consider for deploying mission critical apps on Cloud

Mission-critical applications are those where system or application failure causes damage to organization’s reputation and revenue. The definition of a mission critical application changes depending on the industry vertical one is operating with. The parameters which define the core offerings of the industry are usually considered as to be a part of the mission critical applications. As an example, for the banking sector, the applications involved in defining the revenue parameters are considered as being mission critical. In the same way, applications dealing with defining the operational efficiency for an electronic trading system are considered to be mission critical.

Mission critical application when deployed on Cloud, like any other application, enjoys the  key benefits of  Cloud computing which includes flexibility,cost reduction and  scalability. In the due course of strategizing the placement of mission critical applications on the Cloud, taking care of a few parameters discussed below can make a difference to the end-end operation and stability of the IT architecture. This reduces the complexity involved in decision making during the organization’s technical strategy towards Cloud migration.

Security – For any application on Cloud, security becomes an important parameter to be considered. As a minimum necessity, careful examination of the compliances that the Cloud vendor is authorized for is required. For instance, In order to be HIPAA compliant, enterprises must design their systems and applications to meet HIPAA’s privacy and security standards and related administrative, technical, and physical safeguards. Any Cloud vendor supporting the deployment of health care businesses should compulsorily be HIPAA Compliant.

Service Level Agreements – The agreement that the Cloud user makes with the vendor should concentrate on schedules for service levels and pricing. It should address the vendor’s obligations to assist the customer in transitioning to another vendor .The customer may also want the agreement to allow for periodic benchmarking to compare the services to the marketplace and require the vendor to meet the market.

Reliability – How reliable is the service is a common question that needs to be answered by the Cloud vendors. Reliability comes from the Cloud vendor’s transparency of information like customer’s ability to access stored data, the support response time and a regime for calculating credits based on the vendor’s failure to meet the service level standards. The data hosting location information becomes mandatory for specific government regulations in certain countries like the United Kingdom. Data center location information is also required to understand if the enterprises are residing physically in high risk areas like the ones prone to natural disasters

Fault tolerance – Imagine a situation where there is a power failure, generators fail to start at the data center or even worse, imagine a fire break out at the data center where your businesses is hosted. This would turn hazardous for any mission critical applications. Hence the Cloud environment hosting the business should ideally be a clear fault tolerant system. Amazon’s Availability Zones is a fabulous example where users assign instances to locations that have very high bandwidth between each other. A failure in one zone does not disrupt the service in another and hence the businesses are unaffected.

Disaster recovery plan – Disaster recovery plays a crucial role in case of a disaster like a sudden and unrecoverable loss of an entire data center. A rapid recovery and minimal data loss after a disaster is needed for mission critical applications. For example, by regularly synchronizing the production environments with Amazon S3 and by setting up machine images that mirror the production environments, one should be able to rapidly recover into the Cloud without paying to run an entirely redundant data center 24×7.

As in the case of any other business agreement, a deliberate effort of the service provider along with a carefully drafted mutually agreed service level agreement specifying each parties’ rights, obligations, and liabilities are perhaps the most critical parameters an organization can adopt before deploying mission critical applications into the Cloud.

Jayapriya.K

A recent news article in Computerworld mentioned “As Cloud Computing Grows, Customer Frustration Mounts”. The reason for the fears mainly revolves around the concerns involving Cloud computing. Some of the key concerns of the customers range from as technical as Data transparency and Security to the intangible factors involving trust. Many business concerns like Vendor lock-in also play a very important role in determining the association of organizations with the cloud.

A survey produced by the non-profit Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and the IEEE professional association suggests that security aspects identified as data privacy and encryption are some of the most important concerns of Cloud users. This means that there is an absence of a compliance environment and in-turn a need to create one. Data information like the location of the data, owner of the data and the data after termination of the contract are some of the expectations of a user while adopting Cloud. Hence, it calls for openness and transparency from the Cloud provider.

Another major concern includes the fear of vendor lock-in. Availability of the Cloud provider and the ease of data migration are necessary for Cloud adoption. Hence a clear exit strategy needs to be thought of by the users in case the Cloud providers themselves go out of business. This demands an extra effort from the cloud users to refine the strategy in terms of offering to the end customers. This extra effort may lead cloud users to think twice about exploiting the humongous benefits offered by the Cloud. The problem of vendor lock-in can be solved if there are common data formats, APIs and protocols in place so that the application running on one Cloud provider is easily ported to another.

In choosing a Cloud provider trust plays an important role. I came across an analogy which compared the use of Cloud to the use of bank. One trusts the bank and deposits the money in it because one is sure that the money is safe there. Similar trust is needed to place the business on Cloud, which means there is a need for a “concern-free” Cloud computing environment. If we consider the bank, there are a lot of regulatory bodies which control the standards and regulations and hence the user is sure that even if something goes wrong, the bank is liable for it and an appropriate compensation will be provided if an adverse situation arises. Similar standards and regulations shall ease and accelerate Cloud adoption. The security concerns call for open Cloud standards. Thanks to CSA, a mission to promote the use of best practices for providing security assurance within Cloud Computing has been successfully initiated.

Apart from implementation of the existing standards, a thorough analysis to fill the gap identified in the existing framework will surely contribute towards addressing the major concerns of the cloud adoption. Though these concerns still haunt the market while deciding over the adoption of Cloud computing, the key drivers including cost effectiveness, lesser time to market and optimized scalability remain the benefits of Cloud computing. A proper ROI calculation by considering the intangible parameters plays a key role in the decision making for adopting Cloud as an integral part of the IT infrastructure.

 Jayapriya.K

A lot of people are confused with the differences between Virtualization and Cloud Computing. Are they different? Are they the same? & what defines the relationship between them? A part of this confusion is due to tons of Cloud computing definitions floating around the web. To record these in a holistic manner, we have listed the set of opinions and questions that worry & irk customers:-

1) I have/am using a Data Center which internally uses Virtualization. Am I on Cloud?

2) I am already using Virtualization; do I need to move to Cloud?

3) I have to devise the IT strategy for my organization. Should I include Virtualization or Cloud in it? Which is better?

……

The list is endless.

Virtualization is a half-a-century old technology. It was coined by IBM in the 60’s and since then has revolutionized the Data Center and Enterprise IT Infrastructure.

Effective Utilization is one of the corner stones of Virtualization.

VMware, a company founded in 1998 brought Virtualization in the mainstream, and its products have since dominated the Server Virtualization market.  Xen, a product of Research labs back in 2003, had created a stir in the Open Source world by bringing Cost-effective and reliable virtualization to the masses. Organizations have been either tweaking or using the Xen Virtualization Software to build effective Data Centers.

However, all this was still restricted to the Data Center world. Enterprises looking for a managed Infrastructure services would host their suite of applications in large Data Centers which run on the many Off-the-shelf Virtualization products.

Any new demands from the Customer would lead to a manual intervention at the Data Center, and this would take substantial time. Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity plan also involved manual labor and were inherently risky, and hence required systematic planning. The Virtualized Data Center improved the effectiveness of the Servers, but had no effect on price models, and the Customer involvement was limited. More so, dynamic scaling and on-demand provisioning were unheard of.

Virtualization was a boon to the IT industry, but still had a long way to go in order to create and sustain a market based on economies of scale.

In comes Cloud Computing. Cloud Computing has its foundation in the success of Virtualization and technologies that have enabled Virtualization to perform at near native speed. However it does away with the various challenges and risks involved with plain-vanilla Virtualization solutions. Over the matured layer of Virtualization software, runs a perfectly orchestrated set of services, which enable dynamic provisioning, on demand scaling & high availability aspects of a Cloud. This set of services is then abstracted by a Self Service portal giving users an interface that they identify with.

These services can be categorized as:-

a) Metering, Billing and Rating System

b) Identity Management

c) Dynamic Provisioning Engine

d) Monitoring and Management

e) Security Sub-system.

However, each vendor alters & adds new set of services to the above list in order to improve the functionality of its cloud offering. The careful interaction of these services provides the bare virtualization resources to be available on demand by the user.

Hence Virtualization is a key component of Cloud Computing, but it is the various set of services surrounding it, that gives Cloud Computing the real edge and its game changer qualities.

Cloud Computing is regarded as a Silver bullet to ease the cost & infrastructure woes of an Enterprise, and is currently viewed as a Game Changer for Organizations. It is certain that CIOs haven’t missed it from their radars.

Why Cloud Computing

Let us take a look at the existing scenario. Whenever there is a requirement, to scale up Hardware & Software infrastructure, enterprises make purchase decisions, based on the requirement itself and on any possible future need. An immediate requirement for hardware or software would require considerable amount of time & such delays are fatal in a market where competition rules. To mitigate IT Procurement costs, Virtualization was adopted. Virtualization allows Enterprises generate more value with the existing resources available to them.

Cloud Computing Adoption

Cloud Computing brings a proven perspective & ubiquity to business. The concept of computing available on demand on pay-per-use model can greatly reduce the IT Budgets. Business agility through anytime-anywhere data and applications can reduce the latency between what business demands and IT delivers.

Cloud Computing Adoption Patterns

Beyond the fancy labels, a close look at Cloud Computing reveals considerable number of choices, arrangements and Architectural patterns that an organization must decide upon before thinking about ROIs. To facilitate the migration from a traditional model to the Cloud model, organizations require more than just investment of minds. Decisions range from choosing the type of clouds – Public, Private or Hybrid, to the type of Architectural shifts depending upon the risk and criticality of data involved in an Enterprise. Not to mention the various Cloud Computing vendors and software stacks to choose from. Since the spread of Cloud Computing, the list of Vendors for all kinds of Cloud implementation has been ever growing. Google, Microsoft, Amazon and others have been around for some time, and their technology is mature enough to be adopted at the enterprise level. Concerns regarding Data Security and Infrastructure sharing is another decision Organizations need to take.

To successfully mitigate the risk and challenges involved in an Enterprise Cloud Adoption, a detailed analysis of the existing structure of an Enterprise IT model and Operations is a must. The wide variety of IT Systems in operation, each with its own demand of performance and scalability, requires a careful scrutiny of methods and practices. Moreover with major focus on data security and exclusiveness on a Cloud, a thorough scan of in and outs of Cloud is a necessity.

System Integrators and Cloud Adoption

A SI (System Integrator) specializing in Cloud adoption practice evaluates the existing IT System in an Enterprise. A SI’s role ranges from assessing & recommending the migration of the brick and mortar implementation of Infrastructure to either a public, private or a hybrid form of Cloud, to deciding which existing Desktop applications like CRM, Payroll and ERP may be made available as Software-as-a-Service model.

The SI’s role expands to develop and integrate the solutions it recommends. Since SI’s have the experience in various Cloud vendor implementations they make available best practices that not only reduces the latency in Cloud adoption, but also creates a robust and flexible architecture for the Enterprise. The SI also has understanding of the gaps if any in the IT Systems which requires to be filled when moving to Cloud.

A close interaction between the business and the System Integrator is thus a fruitful bond that can lead to a better and agile progression of Cloud adoption by any Enterprise.

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