Over sixty percent of Irish businesses cited the cost savings as an imperative for cloud adoption in Ireland according to a very recent survey commissioned for Cloud Arena by Seefin Data Management. Now while that may be pretty much par for the course & pretty much part of the standard message of Cloud Computing, others findings from this survey for most Irish cloud companies are of greater concern.
"The biggest challenge is that we need to learn more about Cloud & how it works"
"Inertia & a fear we need to be technically expert"
"Limited knowledge of cloud systems"
These were some of the comments that came back as part of the survey, accompanied by the statistic that over 20% of respondents said that overall understanding of the Cloud within their companies was low & they felt there was a need to educate their staff about the effectiveness of the Cloud. Cloud right now is THE buzzword in I.T., & Irish companies appear to be grasping it quite well when it comes to calling their products 'Cloud', but many of them seem to be very poor at actually using it to present better levels of infrastructural & I.S. cost economics to their business.
The comments about education are in some-ways almost a catch-22. For alot of these companies, if you were to suggest to them that to better educate their staff on the benefits/effectiveness that some form of training needed to be invested in, red flags would appear & a look of panic would befall the CFO in the business. There is also the flip side that in some of these companies that they continue to used aged technology because 'it's what they know', & no matter how great a new piece of tech might be for the business, there may be that I.T. manager who will find a way to shoot it down because it means he/she has to re-train, re-learn new things.
There is a perception that people who work in I.T. always want to learn the newest technologies, always keen to be dynamic, motivated to get to 'play' with new things. This is not always the case. People who work at the cutting edge will always remain there. People who work with older technology, from my own experience have generally tended to stay there, age with the tech they oversee & go through the motions to pick up the paycheck.
Another issue with the cloud is the absolute muddy-ness of the term itself. For companies who are trying to understand how they can harness the cost savings Cloud purports, tell them there's IAAS, PAAS & SAAS & their heads auto-explode instantly. This also is in line with the comments from the Cloud Arena survey of "Inertia & a fear we need to be technically expert".
The muddy-ness doesn;t end there. There's companies who are engaging in re branding services as 'Cloud' for a cash-in, who won't be challenged on it by their industry peers. The entire idea of Cloud following the spectacular collapse of the global economy has helped increase the buy & sell opportunities for cloud off the back of 'cloud saves you money' will not be placed in jeopardy by any kind of internal squabbles in the industry over whose products/services are/are not Cloud, or the industry self-examining. There are some minor indications of this where you'll often see some IAAS providers use statements like 'we are true cloud', but won't then follow-up by saying what is 'not cloud'.
How is any of this supposed to help get those who want to actually help their businesses engage in some obvious wins for their business in terms of costs, redundancy gains, & provider diversity to secure their business futures? It doesn't. All it does is prolong the sales cycles for cloud service providers, leave the issues facing buyers completely unaddressed & ultimately see the industry around the Cloud self-sabotage the opportunities. If you want passengers on your ship, you need to give them clear reasons to come aboard & stay - the idea of 'saves you money' or 'a great deal' is not enough anymore. There has to be an absolutely crystal clear value proposition that is plain as day, as money & credit even more so, is hard to come by these days. Pennies are being watched like they are large denomination notes.
Clarity & transparency about the cloud in the way the bottom part of the cloud food chain needs it to be to give full end-to-end adaptation, & growth I fear will be procrastinated upon the same way migration to IPV6 has been done. I remember discussing about migration & implementation of IPV6 over 6 years ago with some acquaintances of mine who were senior network engineers, & in recent conversations with them, they said they still hadn't moved into IPV6 because there was an argument about cost & the benefits still going on despite the imminent day zero scenario approaching.
Right now, as much as Cloud is the meal ticket for the technology industry, & those who leverage off it heavily to in turn provide services/businesses using it, even the lack of interoperability between various cloud systems/services/products is something that the industry itself won't address because there is too much at stake. It is pretty much an unspoken state of 'hold-fire' that in the near future will come to a crunch-time the same way IPV4 has. All this does is continue to leave the Cloud as an aspiration that people who want it will never reach, much like the white fluffy counterparts in the sky.
Showing posts with label Resiliency. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Resiliency. Show all posts
Thursday, June 16, 2011
Friday, April 22, 2011
Episode 4: The Day The Cloud Crashed & People Lost Their Minds
February 20th 2011 will be a date that cloud commentators, cloud zealots & the opportunists in the cloud will make sure is not forgotten. Amazon AWS had a colossal outage. This article from the BBC exemplifies the kind of coverage that went along with the event. Needless to say, alot of people directly affected as customers of AWS were miffed, as were users of those services hosted there in the affected area. And no, SkyNet did not begin its take-over starting with AWS for those who were concerned.
First off, one thing really needs clarifying about this event, as the reaction in social media circles, especially amongst twitterati was grossly out of of proportion. The reality of this is that a SINGLE region in Amazon's network was down. The rest of their services in the USA were fine, as were their European & their Asian services. The fact that the affected region services so many companies made the issue seem far greater than it was. Amazon AWS customers who engaged in deploying their cloud strategy across multiple regions in Amazon's EC2 system were completely unaffected.
The fact it went on for over ten hours yes is a concern. And rightfully so. But, did it violate Amazon AWS's 99.95% SLA which allows for '4 hours per year of downtime'? Nope. Not even in the slightest, even with their 10 hours of being unavailable to people who were screaming over lack of access to key services. But, screaming doesn't get around SLA's you agree to for services you take, or use. Always check the warranty.
And this is the real thing to remember; the fine print of your SLA's or terms & conditions of service are the last word in any comeback you have. Cloud Providers trying to win business from AWS to their own services around the world, especially in Ireland cried foul. What they neglected to tell those same Irish companies they were trying to win business from as a result of the outage was that their own SLA's & guarantees are in fact absolutely no better than Amazon's ones. In fact, some of them have in their terms & conditions that you have absolutely no comeback whatsoever in the event of an outage, & there are no guarantees on up-time at all, even at centre power/connectivity level, which some at least provide.
The companies who promote their uptime & their 'solid SLAs' if you dig into them are actually nothing more than guarantees against power & network connectivity to an actual hosting center itself, & unless both those fail for more than four hours in a year, you could lose access to your VPS or cloud for days on end due to a hardware, or virtualisation or internal networking issue & they would still not have violated their SLA with you.
Beware of service providers who are eager to bash the performance of their competitors openly. They'll mouth off quite happily about others lack of 'service', while at the same time not being so mouthy about what happens when (not a case of 'if' with technology, but 'when') their services fail on you. And believe me they will. If multi-billion dollar global companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple & others have outages, your local provider who is less equipped staff-wise, financially & technically to be as able to deal with outages as efficiently as those corporations who have vast resources in all areas. It is also important to remember a very old adage when it comes to this, empty vessels make the most noise.
So, you're a company looking to engage a cloud strategy because you can see the benefits, but are scared by what happened with Amazon AWS from what you read on blogs & Twitter. You don't know what to do next. Firstly, the most important thing to do is ignore Twitter & the blogs decrying AWS. These are but a noisy few out of millions. Many of them are vested interests & vested interests should be ignored like the plague.
A good cloud service provider will be upfront with you when you engage them. They should be knowledgable enough to work with you in understanding your requirements, explain what risks there are to what you want to achieve, & provide advice on how to mitigate against the risks to what you want to do. Sure they're there to sell you services & gain your custom, but a good consultant will tell you that they are & should only be part of a solution to you. That as good as the company they represent may be, risk should always be spread.
Every company involved in risk management as a business will tell you that the absolute fundamental to risk management is spreading that risk around in a controlled manner to shore up your mitigation. Mitigating risk is not cheap. So don't fall for companies promising you to be the 'cheapest solution for your business' - they're not. They are if anything given their pricing, a small part of a solution to you. You also need to ensure that you have a communications plan in place in the event of any outages, as well as documented & tested internal procedures on how your teams & staff need to act, & what events need to be triggered if any to mitigate the circumstances or ease them as much as possible.
But this issue goes outside your cloud provider. It comes down to your choice in developer also. Your developer if they are worth their salt should have an application that allows for spread, that allows for redundancy. They should also be advising you to spread your system across at least two providers or two centers at the very least if your single provider can actually do this. Your cloud provider really should even do this. Single cloud services are single points of failure.
And the issue of disaster recovery or planning doesn't even stop at the developer or the service provider. You, as the business owner/operator leading your organisation are the absolute linchpin of it all. Fundamentally, being a good leader means being a good planner. As a leader of yours, it is incumbent upon you to plan, & plan well & properly.
'The Cloud' is not a solution to redundancy, or disaster recovery. It is a tool to help mitigate some aspects of risk at best in a cost effective manner for its part. It should never be the case of "Oh, it's in the cloud, no need to worry or care. It's taken care of already by my cloud provider." Just because it's easy to set up a business in the internet space, doesn't mean normal conventions for business disaster recovery, or 'battle-stations' planning doesn't apply. The fundamentals of good business planning apply to the Internet as much as the high-street. Most of the time, it's just cheaper. Shortcuts on these areas are just that, except to one day being caught proverbially with your pants around your ankles.
Remember; a blip in the operation of your business from an outage won't kill your business, but how you manage that blip, communicate & work towards the point of restoration will determine whether your business will recover when it happens. Another couple of adages worth closing this blogpost with is 'plan for the worst, hope for the best', 'expect the unexpected' & 'if you want peace, prepare for war'.
First off, one thing really needs clarifying about this event, as the reaction in social media circles, especially amongst twitterati was grossly out of of proportion. The reality of this is that a SINGLE region in Amazon's network was down. The rest of their services in the USA were fine, as were their European & their Asian services. The fact that the affected region services so many companies made the issue seem far greater than it was. Amazon AWS customers who engaged in deploying their cloud strategy across multiple regions in Amazon's EC2 system were completely unaffected.
The fact it went on for over ten hours yes is a concern. And rightfully so. But, did it violate Amazon AWS's 99.95% SLA which allows for '4 hours per year of downtime'? Nope. Not even in the slightest, even with their 10 hours of being unavailable to people who were screaming over lack of access to key services. But, screaming doesn't get around SLA's you agree to for services you take, or use. Always check the warranty.
And this is the real thing to remember; the fine print of your SLA's or terms & conditions of service are the last word in any comeback you have. Cloud Providers trying to win business from AWS to their own services around the world, especially in Ireland cried foul. What they neglected to tell those same Irish companies they were trying to win business from as a result of the outage was that their own SLA's & guarantees are in fact absolutely no better than Amazon's ones. In fact, some of them have in their terms & conditions that you have absolutely no comeback whatsoever in the event of an outage, & there are no guarantees on up-time at all, even at centre power/connectivity level, which some at least provide.
The companies who promote their uptime & their 'solid SLAs' if you dig into them are actually nothing more than guarantees against power & network connectivity to an actual hosting center itself, & unless both those fail for more than four hours in a year, you could lose access to your VPS or cloud for days on end due to a hardware, or virtualisation or internal networking issue & they would still not have violated their SLA with you.
Beware of service providers who are eager to bash the performance of their competitors openly. They'll mouth off quite happily about others lack of 'service', while at the same time not being so mouthy about what happens when (not a case of 'if' with technology, but 'when') their services fail on you. And believe me they will. If multi-billion dollar global companies like Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Apple & others have outages, your local provider who is less equipped staff-wise, financially & technically to be as able to deal with outages as efficiently as those corporations who have vast resources in all areas. It is also important to remember a very old adage when it comes to this, empty vessels make the most noise.
So, you're a company looking to engage a cloud strategy because you can see the benefits, but are scared by what happened with Amazon AWS from what you read on blogs & Twitter. You don't know what to do next. Firstly, the most important thing to do is ignore Twitter & the blogs decrying AWS. These are but a noisy few out of millions. Many of them are vested interests & vested interests should be ignored like the plague.
A good cloud service provider will be upfront with you when you engage them. They should be knowledgable enough to work with you in understanding your requirements, explain what risks there are to what you want to achieve, & provide advice on how to mitigate against the risks to what you want to do. Sure they're there to sell you services & gain your custom, but a good consultant will tell you that they are & should only be part of a solution to you. That as good as the company they represent may be, risk should always be spread.
Every company involved in risk management as a business will tell you that the absolute fundamental to risk management is spreading that risk around in a controlled manner to shore up your mitigation. Mitigating risk is not cheap. So don't fall for companies promising you to be the 'cheapest solution for your business' - they're not. They are if anything given their pricing, a small part of a solution to you. You also need to ensure that you have a communications plan in place in the event of any outages, as well as documented & tested internal procedures on how your teams & staff need to act, & what events need to be triggered if any to mitigate the circumstances or ease them as much as possible.
But this issue goes outside your cloud provider. It comes down to your choice in developer also. Your developer if they are worth their salt should have an application that allows for spread, that allows for redundancy. They should also be advising you to spread your system across at least two providers or two centers at the very least if your single provider can actually do this. Your cloud provider really should even do this. Single cloud services are single points of failure.
And the issue of disaster recovery or planning doesn't even stop at the developer or the service provider. You, as the business owner/operator leading your organisation are the absolute linchpin of it all. Fundamentally, being a good leader means being a good planner. As a leader of yours, it is incumbent upon you to plan, & plan well & properly.
'The Cloud' is not a solution to redundancy, or disaster recovery. It is a tool to help mitigate some aspects of risk at best in a cost effective manner for its part. It should never be the case of "Oh, it's in the cloud, no need to worry or care. It's taken care of already by my cloud provider." Just because it's easy to set up a business in the internet space, doesn't mean normal conventions for business disaster recovery, or 'battle-stations' planning doesn't apply. The fundamentals of good business planning apply to the Internet as much as the high-street. Most of the time, it's just cheaper. Shortcuts on these areas are just that, except to one day being caught proverbially with your pants around your ankles.
Remember; a blip in the operation of your business from an outage won't kill your business, but how you manage that blip, communicate & work towards the point of restoration will determine whether your business will recover when it happens. Another couple of adages worth closing this blogpost with is 'plan for the worst, hope for the best', 'expect the unexpected' & 'if you want peace, prepare for war'.
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