Simple ways to smooth functioning on the cloud environment

BANGALORE, INDIA: While virtual and cloud environments differ in significant ways from physical systems, the overall approach to designing a fail-safe private or hybrid cloud is not considerably different from the approach for a traditional IT environment. Here's a checklist:

1. A continuity plan: A surprising number of organizations fail to implement a basic business continuity plan when moving to virtual and cloud environments. Thus when making your plan, start at the beginning: think through your business needs and make sure you build the cloud to address these practical matters.

2. Visibility: Availability is only possible with visibility. Note which database will the application server point to? Can you “see” the health of each application running on virtual machines? When designing a solution, deploy solutions that give you visibility across your physical and virtual infrastructures.

3. Centralized control: In order for your cloud to deliver centralized IT operations, administrators must be able to monitor, manage, and report on multiple business services across different platforms, ideally from a single location. The challenge is that a typical data center is composed of different servers running different operating systems (OSes), and now, various virtual platforms including VMwareR, Hyper-VR etc.

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4. Automated recovery: In a world where minutes of downtime mean lost customers and hours of downtime mean negative news headlines, an effective business continuity plan must include automated recovery of your business services. In addition to speedier fault detection and recovery times, automated solutions reduce your reliance on personnel during an emergency. An effective solution will also detect faults in an application and all its dependent components, including the associated database, OS, network, and storage resources.

5. DR testing: With server and application builds constantly changing, it is important to periodically test your DR strategy; that is the only way to guarantee a successful recovery in the event of a system- or site-wide outage. Because testing can be expensive and cause the downtime you are trying to prevent, IT organizations should consider non-disruptive testing tools.

Therefore, it is absolutely, necessary to 'Build it correctly'. In order to achieve more from our investment and benefit what technology and innovation has to offer we need to be fully aware and be prepared to ensure smooth and efficient functioning of our business.

Source: www.pcquest.com