Head In The Clouds… A Few Questions To Ask…

If you are considering putting your information into the cloud then you should ask a few ‘hard’ questions before you trust your business to someone else. Here are five plus one to get you started…

1) How are you going to protect my information? What is their Information Protection Policy? (After all you don’t want them to sell a server on eBay and throw in your data for free, Lose a DC ROM in the post or leave a laptop in a restaurant…)

2) Who has access to my data? Just how many people can see it, copy it… lose it…

3) What are you doing about system availability? What is the time to recover after an outage? How much data will I lose? (What are the Recovery Time Objectives and the Recovery Point Objectives?) Is there a second data centre where you can automatically move the application and data to?

4) How do you monitor performance? Hopefully end-to-end rather than just server uptime… what if the network is down?

5) Do you have alternative network and power connections?

And finally… How easy is it for me to migrate my data somewhere else? This is the one that is hard to ask (after all it sounds like you might run to a competitor at any minute) but is essential. While you have a lot of choice of vendors to start with, you don’t want to be locked in - so it needs to be easy to migrate your information (and applications) elsewhere.

September 11, 2008 | Filed Under Cloud computing, Information Policy | Leave a Comment 

When Is Cloudy Day Is Better Than A Sunny One?

Cloud 999
It happened again, the cloud went away. Of course we are not talking about clouds in the sky, but one of those on the Internet. The outage was 8 hours this time - so a ‘working’ day. It was a Sunday, but that doesn’t mean that people aren’t working - we live in a 24×7 world, so 8 hours is 8 hours.

(Some) customers were quick to come to the defence of the service this time - but perhaps they wouldn’t have been if it had lasted a week… or maybe if it had been a Tuesday…

Choosing a service provider is not as easy as it appears - you do need to ask about their Disaster Recovery / Business Continuity plans and ensure their plans meet your needs, otherwise you could end up with no service and no business.

July 22, 2008 | Filed Under Availability, Cloud computing, disaster recovery | Leave a Comment