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09.4.2012
“Please help, save me! Do something!” These are simple messages that people convey when they experience a natural disaster like the 2011 Japanese Tohoku Earthquake and consequent Tsunami. Natural disasters like floods, tsunami, tornadoes, hurricanes or man-made (or technological) hazards are difficult to predict and to fully prepare for. These disastrous events can occur anytime, anywhere.
A natural disaster or man-made disaster of intense magnitude can disrupt power supply, destroy hardware infrastructure, or limit connectivity and can cause entire business establishments to tumble down. For a country like Japan, which is among the world’s most technologically advanced nations, the impacts of outages in data centers can be catastrophic. This scenario was a testimony for the growing need for effective cloud disaster prevention and backup strategies in order to combat such catastrophic events. Most Japanese enterprises have adopted the latest cloud-based data management and business models and when tragedy struck, it delivered a key blow to all their business processes, rendering millions using their services stuck in the uncertainty without any means to carry out their activities.
Loss Prevention:
Disasters are inevitable, but the question is: Are you prepared? According to a study by Gartner, 80 percent of all companies that experience a major disaster will go out of business if they cannot gain access to their data within 24 hours. As far as cloud computing is concerned, there are several key aspects to make note of while the initial infrastructure for such business model is planned and implemented. As with any issue, prevention is better than cure and wiser methods to prevent data loss or information damage is a much safer way to combat outages in cloud services rather than having to assemble every piece of information from scratch after the disaster has occurred.
During the great tohoku earthquake and tsunami in Japan in 2011, one of the biggest mistakes made by Japanese businesses was that their data centers and cloud infrastructure was all set up at seismically sensitive and disaster prone geographical locations. If this infrastructure was set up at a location that is usually immune to natural disasters, then the chances of service disruptions due to disasters would have been minimized.
Identify the disaster recovery plan:
Having an effective disaster recovery procedure is a key factor in this context. For countries like Japan, which often lie in the war path of nature’s forces, it is wise for businesses to have an effective disaster recovery procedure prepared and documented as soon as they shift to modern age business models such as cloud computing-based operations.
Decisions should be made as to who will head the recovery team, how many members should be present in the recovery team, what kind of software and hardware tools are required for recovery, the costs involved in the entire recovery procedure, estimation of time required for every individual recovery module as well as the total time for the entire recovery procedure, criticality and priority of tasks should be documented so that higher priority tasks with high criticality can resume their services before lower priority tasks as well as tasks depended on these high priority tasks. These procedures may seem easy to read, but require months of effort and teamwork to formulate an effective Recovery Decision strategy.
Decisions should be made as to who will head the recovery team, how many members should be present in the recovery team, what kind of software and hardware tools are required for recovery, the costs involved in the entire recovery procedure, estimation of time required for every individual recovery module as well as the total time for the entire recovery procedure, criticality and priority of tasks should be documented so that higher priority tasks with high criticality can resume their services before lower priority tasks as well as tasks depended on these high priority tasks. These procedures may seem easy to read, but require months of effort and teamwork to formulate an effective Recovery Decision strategy.Periodic drills carried out for disaster recovery procedures would be a very intuitive option as the recovery team will then be well prepared and know exactly what to do in the event of a catastrophe without having to wait for instructions and vital information at a time when speed of operation is more important than anything else. Working on live scenarios of recovery would provide enough expertise for recovery staff to deal with once a catastrophe occurs.
A major factor to note is that, recovery of cloud-based business models is one of the most critical tasks as far as a modern business enterprise is concerned. No data should be lost or damaged and the procedures should be completed as fast as possible because every second of service disruption can prove to be fatal for the businesses future. As such, technical staff with proper expertise should be deployed and enterprises should not take chances with any aspect of recovery.
So, enterprises in a modern country like Japan should always be on the alert when it comes to natural disasters and they should put in every effort to ensure that their services should not be disrupted and if disrupted, they should be restored without any loss of information as soon as possible.
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Mandira Srivastava is a fulltime freelance writer who specializes in technology, health and fitness, politics, and financial writing. Equipped with degree of mass communication and having worked for both private and corporate clients, I have experience meeting a wide range of writing requirements and styles.
09.3.2012
Not so long ago, only the very large companies could afford to set up ERP systems. The reasons were simple – costs were high, risks were even higher and some implementations even resulted in abject failure and bankruptcy. The benefits were also correspondingly high and any company with a successful ERP would be operating at a different plane altogether. Small and medium businesses simply could not think of these solutions.
The situation is very different now. ERP delivered as a service – essentially a subset of SaaS has changed the game and leveled the field. SaaS by itself is seeing growth rates of 25.5% and will hit revenues of $40 billion by 2014, nearly 34% of all software will be utilized over the cloud and this growth would continue for some time to come. Research shows that although ERP in the cloud was just 2% of the cloud computing market in 2010 – 2011, this is a field that has begun to evolve and its market share would increase to 21% by 2015. Therefore ERP moving to the cloud is not an unexpected phenomenon.
Battling an uncertain economy
In an uncertain economy, companies have much to gain by embracing the efficiencies and process visibility that ERP can bring. With ERP in the cloud, companies are able to lower the cost of ownership and if ever the company wants to move to on premise hosted systems, the cloud SaaS vendor provides assistance with the migration process.
There used to be a feeling that on-premise ERP systems were more capable and . offered greater functionality. This is no longer true. Most cloud ERPs are able to tailor their offerings to handle any specific requirements. Security has ceased to be a stumbling block and availability of systems is at par or higher than that of in-premise systems.
Going Hybrid helps
Many businesses have experimented with hybrid ERPs. This means that some part of the ERP system works in the public cloud and others – perhaps the ones that deal with what the company considers its key capabilities – are maintained in-house or in a private cloud. Such an approach is more readily accepted by conservative Boards. They would rather try the less critical modules first and if the experience is good, then they would move more critical modules online as they get more confident.
Research quoted above also showed that nearly 79% of respondents were looking to reduce their TCO of ERP. 54% of the small and medium businesses polled also wanted to avoid procuring new servers, hardware and software to set up the ERP. Other advantages are –
While all other ‘traditional’ advantages of the cloud remain and are not being discussed here due to paucity of space, there are some areas to watch out for as well.
Control over data – It is important to be careful about how your data is being stored in the ERP database. It is worth checking how easy it would be to switch from Vendor A to B at some time in the future. You do not want your data to be stored in a proprietary format that can only be read through the vendor’s own application.
Managing your Service Level Agreement – Your SLA must clearly spell out the vendor’s responsibilities. The standard parameters of availability, etc. must be there, but it is equally important to ensure clauses like modifications to meet your specific needs, assistance during migration to in-house infrastructure or to another vendor and so on.
Managing the process – Simply because another agency is manning the data center does not mean that you can afford to sit back and relax. A certain amount of core competence in ERP management is still essential. There is training to be done all the time to make new entrants aware of the ERP and how it is to be used and work is to be done to identify areas of improvements and upgrades. These upgrades and improvements have to be an ongoing process and make your ERP grow and become more effective.
In the final analysis – An ERP solution in the cloud is a great leveler and gives small and medium industries the resources they need to compete with multinationals in niche areas. With the benefits of ERP and the agility that comes with being small, these businesses can grow and prosper.
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Sanjay Srivastava has been active in computing infrastructure and has participated in major projects on cloud computing, networking, VoIP and in creation of applications running over distributed databases. Due to a military background, his focus has always been on stability and availability of infrastructure. Sanjay was the Director of Information Technology in a major enterprise and managed the transition from legacy software to fully networked operations using private cloud infrastructure. He now writes extensively on cloud computing and networking and is about to move to his farm in Central India where he plans to use cloud computing and modern technology to improve the lives of rural folk in India.
09.1.2012
The new budding technology, otherwise known as cloud computing is attached to multiple advantages including efficiency, accessibility and ease of use. This entry explains some of these advantages as one of our engineers gives concrete illustrations of some of the processes that make up the dynamics of cloud computing.
Cloud Computing in a Nutshell
The great idea behind cloud computing is the separation of the software and hardware. Before cloud, in order to put up a website, one would buy a server, have it setup and OS installed by a technician, and send it off to the data-center to be tucked into a rack with power, network, and cooling. Now software designers can concentrate on the OS and their software while the provider takes care of the physical hardware.
How? They make sure that the physical hardware underlying the virtual machines keeps running. If that is working well, accessibility and cloud flexibility services to the virtual machines running on them can be provided - services not available to those running their own hardware and software.
User monitoring of the cloud
The virtual machines the customer uses acts just like a physical machine. This is so the customer can install the server OS they need and everything performs as it should. So the customer manages everything inside that virtual machine. But wrong configurations, user mistakes, malicious code, bad updates, traffic spikes, run-away processes, etc do still happen inside the virtual machine. Therefore the user knows best what to monitor and how to fix it.
Monitoring alerts and such give the user more control and warning without having to constantly watch the server themselves. For most situations the user can decide what should be done and they are given the tools available to a cloud service.
Addressing issues arising from the provider’s services
When the situation arises where the problem is in the provider’s physical hardware or cloud services and not the user’s virtual machine, there are methods for solving those:
What can a user gain from monitoring performance?
Monitoring setup by the user should catch common problems the user can fix. Some may include overloaded virtual machines and/or services, services that stop responding.
If the problem lies elsewhere the user can check any maintanence/trouble reports posted on the control panel by the provider. If those don’t seem to be solving the problem then the user should contact the provider where they can example the virtual machine and see where the problem is.
What is the difference between a hot migration and a cold migration?
The migration function is yet another advantage of using virtual machines in Cloud computing systems. There are two types of migration function: hot and cold.
Hot migration is the transfer of the OS and applications from virtual machines to physical machines without stopping OS operations or applications. In a highly demanding environment such as a public cloud, with even the best servers, the risk of failure starts to rise after around 3 years. The hot migration function easily avoids downtime caused by failure and maintenance issues with physical machines. Hot migration fulfills several needs:
Hot migration can be seen as a service not offered by the traditional non-cloud setup. Also, it means flexibility and choice when the user understands they can protect themselves from the physical hardware underneath.
Cold migration, meanwhile, suspends OS and applications on virtual machines before transferring them to physical machines. Types of migration available depend on the hypervisor selected. With cold migration, you have the option of moving the associated disks from one datastore to another. The virtual machines are not required to be on shared storage. The virtual machine you want to migrate must be powered off prior to beginning the cold migration process.
Our articles are written to provide you with tools and information to meet your IT and cloud solution needs. Join us on Facebook and Twitter.
About the Guest Author:
Bryan Kinney is a technical engineer at GMO Cloud. He has been working in the I.T. field for the last 18 years but have been into computers personally for 29 years. Always loves good logical puzzles and non-logical human ones too. Originally from the Northwest USA and can get into hiking and survival camping.