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Public cloud is increasingly attractive because of its scale, global reach, agility and efficiency, making it the optimal deployment option for a growing number of workloads, applications and business solutions.

But what businesses gain in terms of flexibility could come back to haunt them in other ways, in terms of overall cost, durability, security and supportability as the solution matures.

Getting the right people

Even if the business is notionally ready for hyperscale, organisations still have to address the issue of trying to find the right people to support their move into the public cloud. Creating environments and instances in the public cloud may be simple but finding the right people to create secure, highly available, integrated and well-supported software solutions is not.

The temptation is to assume an organisation’s existing IT team will be able to handle any hyperscale transformation and ongoing management, but it’s not always as straightforward as it says on the tin. It can be hard to keep skills relevant when the capabilities and services offered by hyperscalers change constantly with over 1000 updates/ features released a year. In addition, those skills are in high demand and attract premium salaries so businesses are frequently at risk of having their talent poached by rivals. There’s also a danger that the skills of the people who develop the solutions are misapplied to ongoing support afterwards.

Getting enough people

Even if businesses have the right people and skills, the other question they need to ask is do they have enough of them? Hyperscale does not sit easily alongside the traditional model of a static technical workforce with siloed specialisms. Instead, organisations may need to introduce lightweight, flatter structures and processes that favour collaboration and cross functional working. These are better suited to a DevOps approach, which goes hand in hand with hyperscale. With technical resources tuned to support the business in an increasingly fluid way, the most effective teams are frequently multi-discipline.

Getting them in the right place

Businesses need to be sure that, like their applications and workloads, their valuable people resources are also in the most appropriate ‘execution venue’ for their skillsets. Internal expertise should not be diluted by ongoing infrastructure management when they are better suited to drive innovation that creates competitive edge or enhances the customer experience.

Getting a managed cloud service

The promise of hyperscale is undoubtedly extremely compelling, but many businesses find their ambitions thwarted by issues such as a lack of budget, time, technical skills, resources, confidence or vision.

A managed cloud provider (MCP) can help businesses to bypass the requirement to create and manage an internal talent pool, reduce the expense and overhead of providing ongoing training, monitoring, alerting, authentication, backup and restore. The MCP can also provide best practice architectures to accelerate solution development along with the skills and insight to enhance custom development.

MCPs can be especially valuable where tools and automation processes are complex, deep expertise relatively scarce and the price of management failure (typically around solution durability and cost control) high and well documented.

Obligatory analogy

To use a building analogy, even with limited DIY skills, it is relatively easy to construct a garden shed (your quick-start hyperscale solution), or transfer an existing one from a neighbour’s garden (think technical lift and shift). The structure can then be used to hold gardening tools and the lawnmower (read application code and data).

Sheds are useful and fulfill a temporary or ‘good enough’ requirement for contents not important enough to merit their own space in the house. When it comes to building something long lasting or habitable, most people would probably consider engaging an estate agent or an architect and builder to deliver a home with running water, electricity (monitoring and alerting), a number of separate rooms and a hall for welcoming visitors (semi-segregated areas for security).

Very few people would consider designing and building a house on their own – most don’t want to source, contract and manage all the different professionals, trades and suppliers involved.  Instead, engaging an expert third party who has all the necessary technical qualifications and experience ensures things are put together correctly and operate efficiently.

It may be a laboured analogy – and it’s probably also a renter’s market – but the fact is that public cloud is becoming a more and more viable option for an increasing number of scenarios – and an increasing number of businesses are moving their entire digital footprint into hyperscale. So for organisations trying to work out why their shed can’t be more like a permanent residence, it might be time to call in the professionals – think about the real-world impact of that leaky tap.

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According to a report by one of the big four auditors, KPMG, more than 40% of companies that suffer a major business disruption are unable to recover from the long-term impact of the failure and go out of business within two years.

To avoid this fate, organisations must have a solid disaster recovery strategy in place. Cloud-based disaster recovery and backup solutions are giving companies of all sizes access to business continuity capabilities that were once only available to enterprises with large IT footprints. However, many teams are confused about the difference between disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) and backup. As a result, companies are settling for inadequate protection or spending more money than necessary on solutions that they do not essentially need.

The bank account analogy

I’ve found it’s helpful to use an analogy to explain the difference. Let’s pretend your IT systems are actually a bank account. Now, if you find yourself with a zero balance in your bank account you’re in a dark place. However, let’s pretend you didn’t know it and wrote one more cheque to, let’s say, the paper boy (it’s the 90s in this analogy so I can say paper boy).

The backup system is like having £1000 under your mattress. This is what happens. The cheque bounces; you incur a £30 fee; the paper boy is annoyed; you hand him some cash next time he delivers the paper and he recovers.

So, you are safe. You keep getting your ever-critical morning paper but it hurt a bit and took a few days to resolve.

If this were an IT system, maybe you’d have to find/buy new hardware, set it up, find the backup and bring the systems up from the backup copy. All this would take a few days, at a minimum, and all the while you’d lose some revenue due to systems being down and a bunch of people would be pretty peeved. But, at the end of the day, you wouldn’t lose all your data. It was backed up.

A disaster recovery system on the other hand is like an overdraft account. This is what happens. The cheque clears and the paper boy is none the wiser. Your bank extends a ‘loan’ to you in the form of an overdraft account, for which you may pay a bit of interest. You can rectify the situation with funds from elsewhere at your earliest convenience.

So, you are also safe and there was no discontinuity of service. It may have cost a bit, but not a lot. By and large, no one really knew anything went wrong.

If this were an IT system, your failover would happen in seconds or minutes to a cloud-based target environment where the workloads would hum along as though nothing happened. Until you were ready to fail-back you would pay a relatively small fee for the resources you used. No one would be angry about lost revenue or broken systems.

Making the right choice for your business

Now that the difference between the two is clear, let’s come back to the present day. Which solution do you go with to protect your business? For workloads where downtime is deadly, DRaaS is the way to go. For workloads where you’d hate to lose the data, but it isn’t critical stuff (like development systems), backup may be sufficient. For many operational and regulatory compliance reasons, customers may do both.

Increasingly we are finding that many of our customers are looking at a blended solution. The nice thing is that you can easily configure and deploy both, while making use of an exceptional global cloud infrastructure that provides access to off-site alternatives at a fraction of the cost of building another data centre. Additionally, with bonuses like free bandwidth, no setup fees, encrypted storage and included technical support, this is a solution that you can easily sell to your business.

Any extended loss of productivity can lead to a reduced cash flow through late invoicing, lost orders and increased costs as staff work extra hours to recover from the downtime, missed delivery dates and so on. After all, to go back to my analogy, no one wants to deal with an irate paper boy – or even worse – an irate executive.

Today nearly all of us have our information stored on the cloud. It’s a very easy solution that allows users to seamlessly create back-ups of photos, contacts and other personal information, giving users access to their accounts anywhere from any device. Perhaps its most prized feature is that it has no storage limits, unlike mobile devices and PCs.
There is, however, a downside to cloud services. Although it is useful in storing data, it could be the reason data is lost. Recently, the celebrity iCloud hack went to trial. The hacker admitted he acquired the credentials by spear phishing his victims and once he had them, all the data they stored on the cloud, whether intentionally or not, was exposed and later posted online.

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