BEING IN THE CLOUD

1.WHAT IS CLOUD COMPUTING ?

It is more than anything on the internet and also more than virtualization technologies. The concise definition put forth by the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) is

cloud computing is a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g. networks,  servers, storage, application and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.

2. WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERISTICS OF CLOUD COMPUTING?

NIST's five essential characteristics of cloud computing provides enough specifics to break the myth that "the internet equals the cloud".  Neither simple web hosting  nor virtualized data centers  deliver the following  comprehensive cloud benefits:

1. On-demand self-service

2. Broad network access

3. Resource pooling

4. Rapid elasticity

5. Measured Service

3. WHAT ARE THE SERVICE MODELS AVAILABLE?

1.  Infrastructure as a Service (Iaas)

2.  Platform as a Service (PaaS)

3.  Software as a Service (Saas)

The other two service model apart from the standard service models are:

4. Data as a Service (Daas)

5.  Business Process as Service (BPaaS).

 4 .WHAT ARE DIFFERENT TYPES OF DEPLOYMENT MODELS AVAILABLE?

Cloud computing environment fall into one of four different models mentioned below:

a. Public Cloud

b. Private Cloud

c. Community cloud

d. Hybrid cloud

5. WHAT ARE THE RISKS INVOLVED IN CLOUD COMPUTING?

Many foresee 'Security of data' as a major risk involved in cloud computing.

 Multitenancy  may bring performance issue.

6. WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES OF CLOUD COMPUTING BEYOND COST SAVINGS?

1. Reduced resource needs

2 .Reduced time to market

3. Reduced capital expenditure

4. Increased availability

                5. Cost transparency

ON BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND DISASTER RECOVERY

In today's environment, especially in changing weather conditions pose severe threat to Business continuity. Not only, weather conditions but also hardware failure, virus attack plays havoc in business continuity. What needs to be done in this kind of situation? To have uninterrupted business continuity, proper Disaster Recovery (DR) plan should be in place. There are few questions to be asked before planning for DR.

1.  Is sufficient infrastructure in place for recovery of data if Disaster occurs?

2.  How much time will recovery take, when a disaster is declared?

3.  How much data will be lost while doing the recovery process?

4.  Is our mission-critical data is safe in the event of disaster?

The Two key points to be considered are:

Recovery time objective (RTO) :- the amount of time between an outage and restoration of operations.

Recovery point objective (RPO) :- the point in time where data is restored and reflects the amount of data that will be ultimately lost during the recovery process.

There are different models of disaster recovery.

In a dedicated model, the infrastructure is dedicated to single organization. IT infrastructure is mirrored at the disaster recover site and is ready to be called upon in the event of disaster.

In a shared recovery model, the infrastructure is shared among multiple organizations in other words cloud based recovery.

Normally in a dedicated recovery model, recovery is much faster than the shared model.

It is up to the organisation to choose the recovery model based upon their need. Normally it is trade-off between cost and speed.

It is better to seek the advice of business continuity specialist when planning for DR.