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The Ins and Outs of Cloud-Based Disaster Recovery (DR)

Cloud DROutages are inevitable. As we’ve seen over the past few years, every major cloud vendor’s experienced at least one, and we can expect that they will again at some point in the future. As cloud consumers, we need to be able to use the cloud’s building blocks and unlimited resources (at least, in theory), and create service robustness and high availability. Yet, important issues, like SLAs, remain unclear when it comes to consuming resources and services from IaaS vendors.Today, more than ever, online software service vendors, have a lot to lose when their services suffer from performance degradation. They could lose significant amounts of revenue as a result of actual outages as well as diminished user loyalty. In this article, I will share baseline perceptions and methods of cloud-based DR.

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The Inevitable Cloud Outage: 5 Key Essentials to Safe Guard Your Application

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A while back, I was starting up an EC2 instance on the AWS cloud when it entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment efforts we’d made (installation and service configuration) over two weeks just went down the drain. So we called support. The support rep redirected us to his team leader who simply told us that, as indicated in the SLA, we had to abide by the shared responsibility model and they were not liable for our loss.
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ClickSoftware – Great Case of an AWS Cloud Adoption: Part 1, Operations

imageOver the last year I had endless conversations with companies that strive to adopt the cloud – specifically the Amazon cloud. Of those I met, I can say that ClickSoftware is one of the leading traditional ISVs that managed to adopt the cloud. The Amazon cloud is with no doubt the most advanced cloud computing facility, leading the market. In my previous job I was involved in the ClickSoftware cloud initiative, from decision making with regards to Amazon cloud all the way to taking the initial steps to educate and support the company’s different parties in providing an On-Demand SaaS offering.
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High Availability of Your Cloud Expectations

Cloud SLAThe Cloud Service Level Agreement (SLA) discussion puts penalties and compensations on the table. Can we say that the compensation method the customer expects is the same as the Software as a Service (SaaS) vendor’s SLA provides?

A while ago, I experienced issues while starting up a specific instance on Amazon AWS cloud. I’m still not sure why, but the instance entered an endless restart loop. All the application deployment work (installation and configuration of a service) we did on it for about two weeks just went down the drain. Discussion with the Amazon AWS support team ended with an escalation of the support request to their head of support.

Take a look at the following paragraphs copied from the Amazon AWS EC2 SLA –

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The Inevitable Outage of the Cloud

Cloud Disaster Recovery DilbertTraditionally delivering high availability often meant replicating everything. However, today with the option of going to the cloud we can say that providing two of everything is costly. High availability should be planned and achieved at several different levels: including the software, the data center and the geographic redundancy. According to a recent study the cost of a data center outage ranges from a minimum cost of $38,969 to a maximum of $1,017,746 per organization, with an overall average cost of $505,502 per incident.

1 – Total cost of partial and complete outages can be a significant expense for organizations.

2 – Total cost of outages is systematically related to the duration of the outage.

3 – Total cost of outages is systematically related to the size of the data center

4 – Certain causes of the outage are more expensive than others.  Specifically, IT equipment failure is the most expensive root cause.  Accidental/human error is least expensive.

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The Cloud Security Part 1: For Dummies

cloud security considerationsFrom an attacker’s perspective, cloud providers aggregate access to many victims’ data into a single point of entry. As the cloud environments become more and more popular, they will increasingly become the focus of attacks. Some organizations think that liability can be outsourced, but no, and I hope that we all understand it cannot. The contract with your cloud vendors basically means nothing, the ISVs or should I say the `SaaS providers`  still holds the responsibility, so rather than focusing on contracts and limiting liability in cloud services deals, you should focus on controls and auditability.

“Dropbox, … deceived users about the security ..The FTC complaint charges Dropbox with telling users that their files were totally encrypted” Wired Magazine

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99.999%?

High Availability (HA) is an interesting subject that I am tracking as part of my journey in OD (On-Demand) market of ISVs. Alot of questions are raised when this discussion take place,…

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