Let’s face it; cloud computing infrastructures are not without flaw. If nothing, the failure of the EBS system in one of Amazon’s EC2 data centers located in the Eastern U.S. teaches us that.
However, the incident also underscores how cloud infrastructures, when managed correctly, can ensure effective resiliency in IT operations. Don’t know how to do that? Here’s how:
Plan for failure in the cloud: The first step in planning for business continuity is anticipating failure. So, anticipate it and prepare your system for it. Protect your organization from unplanned downtime by a) building redundancy and b) building diversity directly into your disaster recovery and business continuity systems. To do that you must make sure your business systems run on many different infrastructures so that should the unfortunate event occur, your systems can fall over between each other quickly and efficiently. Don’t forget to diversify so that your servers can withstand local outages. How about “pulling the plug?” This is a great way to examine the resiliency of your system. Major cloud infrastructure users, Netflix for example, have been found to do that. It randomly kills running server instances and services just to make sure the overall system continues to operate well without them.
Redundancy and Automation in the Cloud: Combine redundancy in design with automation in the cloud and you are more than prepared for the unforeseen. To ensure redundancy in design, you must architect a solution that has components capable of withstanding failures of individual nodes, whether those are servers, storage volumes, or entire data centers. Once you are done with that, your task is to find out what components of your architecture respond automatically to failure, what parts respond nearly automatically, and which not at all? The more automated the components, the better your operational excellence. For better automation, your system design and configuration should be easily replicable.
Customizable Best Practices in the Cloud: There are plenty of customizable practices in the cloud, make sure you get one for your system. A good cloud management system should make the process of launching entire deployments easier and should provide complete visibility into all infrastructures through a central management dashboard that allows administrators to monitor performance and make capacity changes based on real-time needs.
Are you still trying to figure out if the cloud is right for your Markham business? Not to worry, your team at Idealogical have been hard at work understanding all the risks associated with running your business in the cloud. We have many applications that we use which sit in data centers around Canada and we know how to properly prepare your business for a cloud solution.
Give us a call today.
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