Cloud Takes A Hit: Amazon Must Fix EC2

Wed, 02/15/2012 - 09:50 — Steve Pailthorpe

Amazon's "availability zones" were a key protective concept for the cloud, but they failed to protect access to data when EC2 went down. It has been almost a year since AWS took a massive hit with its North American Data Center Outages, as the annivesary of this event draws closer it is a good time for all of us to reflect on how important it is to mitigate risk in IT. Whether you are an advocate on premise solutions or focused on the Cloud for IT resources, both come with there unique sets of risks. Both IT strategies have there pros and cons which I do not plan to detail in this piece but more this piece is focused on how to leverage both to get maximum agility with the lowest risk to the business by using a Hybrid Model. Hybird cloud takes the best of both worlds and combines them to provide the maximum ROI on IT assets. 

Hybrid Cloud by its nature forces more careful planning and risk mitigation discussions as you must have Service Level Agreements across the board. The key things to make sure you get in those agreements are the following:

• Start with A consulting engagement to help work through the application portfolio and determine which applications are suitable for cloud
• Use that Consulting as  the framework for availbilty guarnentees-get commitments for financial penalties for outages
• Make sure you and your provider are using VM Ware and that you retain control through the VMware Vcloud director
• Explore which applications need to interoperate and get commitments for that integration-again with financial penalties for disruption
• Make sure your cloud provider is in a Tier 3 Plus data Centre with multiple sites having mirror image architectures
• Get commitment for redundancy in connectivity and make sure your network does not impact application performance
• Insist on a best of breed Cloud solution where the provider uses market leaders through out the architecture
• Make sure they stay current on the platform and insist on inspections of the Data Centre and Kit to keep them honest
• Lastly, make sure there is a cultural fit with your cloud providers and your other IT staff, as they need to work as a team
 

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