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Fixing Your Cloud Journey

January 9, 2022 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Fixing Your Cloud Journey

In some way or another, the world-changing events of 2020 and 2021 have reshaped nearly everything that we knew, and high availability was no exception. Despite closures and restrictions, many IT teams traded on-prem data centers for the cloud. Many are asking, ‘Now what?’ Here are five things to do to fix your cloud journey in 2022.

Add high availability

In the push to the cloud many IT and business leaders found themselves rushing to move services and applications from data centers that they were closing due to COVID-19 into the cloud. Others rushed to the cloud, not because of data center closures, but to deal with the wave of exploding demand. For some, the journey to the cloud was so fast that HA wasn’t included, and now they’ve discovered the hard way that applications still crash in the cloud and that unexpected outages and unplanned downtime are still the nemesis of AWS, Azure and GCP as much as they were in their previous data center.

The first step in fixing your cloud journey is to add a c. This will mean several things to your enterprise:
- Designing and architecting a highly available and redundant architecture
- Choosing software and services that will protect critical components and applications
- Defining and documenting associated processes and procedures, and at least a minimal governance
- Deploying production copies for quality assurance, procedural testing, and chaos testing
Expand for higher availability for disaster recovery

Of course, not everyone made the move to cloud without considering some form of HA. Some IT teams had the foresight to not leave HA on-premises, but in the rush to cloud moved all of their critical servers to the same cloud Availability Zone. While having some HA protections is better than complete vulnerability, if you’ve only deployed your servers and applications in a single Availability Zone (AZ), now is the time to expand to multi-AZ for your standby cluster node, or even build in disaster recovery by deploying a third node in a different region. SIOS’ has helped dozens of customers plan multiple-AZ architectures and add disaster recovery solutions.
Build your team

Overnight some companies, and their IT teams, went from being fully on-premises to wrestling with Cloud Formation Templates, QuickStart Guides, IAM roles, internal load balancers, Overlay IPs, and deciphering what exactly that VM size means. Now is the time to build a team to support the journey to the cloud. This will mean several things:
- Adding capacity. Unless you were able to pull off a complete lift and shift, you likely have the same staff managing cloud and on-premises applications. Legacy solutions are known for being temperamental and requiring a lot of work to keep them stable and available.To navigate the cloud journey ahead you’ll need capacity capable of addressing availability requirements, understanding cloud architecture, and plotting the course forward for enterprise needs.
- Augmenting skills with training. Give your team training for the cloud. To manage and plan the course forward, look for ways to augment the IT excellence within your organization with additional training on cloud solutions, architecture, best practices, and trade-offs. A confidently trained staff will not only pay dividends in increased availability, but they will also pay dividends by addressing availability, maintenance, and growth in an economic, scalable and logical way. Translation: they’ll avoid wasting money as they build out the rest of your cloud infrastructure.
Integrating automation and analytics

As VP of Customer Experience at SIOS Technology Corp. I have worked with several companies that made the move to the cloud in 2021 without sacrificing HA, DR or their team. If you took achieving the required number of nines of uptime (99.99%) seriously and having a disaster plan was non-negotiable then it’s time to add the rigor of analytics and additional monitoring. Ensure that your availability solution has application-aware automation and orchestration for recovery in the event of a disaster or unplanned downtime. Add analytics and automation to solidify your solution and take your cloud migration up another notch from one of reactive failovers to proactive notification and mitigation of the failure before it occurs. Imagine being notified of underperforming applications, or of increasing latency, errors, or VM non-responsive behavior in time to avoid downtime in the peak business times. Analytics are also important as they can reveal systems and applications that may have escaped your original availability architecture.
Update processes and governance

Many things we think of as a failure are rooted in a failure of process. Make sure that your organization’s processes are up to date, well-documented, properly communicated and adhered to. These processes should contain a few key minimums related to who, what, when, where, and how all tied back to the business strategies, goals, and organizational needs as they pertain to the customer.

Make sure that ownership and sign-off processes for your new cloud environment are well-documented. I have seen firsthand the frustration that comes from conflicting, clashing or unresolved roles and responsibilities for customers who have moved from hardware teams that acquire infrastructure to cloud teams. Muddling through a migration is one set of pain points, digging out of a disaster without clear governance is a much bigger, more costly issue.

If you’ve made the leap to cloud, staying there and making it work for you is the next part of the journey. If your cloud journey was sudden or rocky, consider these five points for fixing your cloud journey and know that SIOS Technology can help you improve not only your high availability in the cloud, but also your processes for running in the cloud.

Reproduced with permission from SIOS

Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery

October 30, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Multi-Cloud Disaster Recovery

If this topic sounds confusing, we get it. With our experts’ advice, we hope to temper your apprehensions – while also raising some important considerations for your organisation before or after going multi-cloud. Planning for disaster recovery is a common point of confusion for companies employing cloud computing, especially when it involves multiple cloud providers.

It’s taxing enough to ensure data protection and disaster recovery (DR) when all data is located on-premises. But today many companies have data on-premises as well as with multiple cloud providers, a hybrid strategy that may make good business sense but can create challenges for those tasked with data protection. Before we delve into the details, let’s define the key terms.

What is multi-cloud?

Multi-cloud is the utilization of two or more cloud providers to serve an organization’s IT services and infrastructure. A multi-cloud approach typically consists of a combination of major public cloud providers, namely Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP), and Microsoft Azure.

Organizations choose the best services from each cloud provider based on costs, technical requirements, geographic availability, and other factors. This may mean that a company uses Google Cloud for development/test, while using AWS for disaster recovery, and Microsoft Azure to process business analytics data.

Multi-cloud differs from hybrid cloud which refers to computing environments that mix on-premises infrastructure, private cloud services, and a public cloud.

Who uses multiple clouds?

Regulated industries – Many organizations run different business operations in different cloud environments. This may be a deliberate strategy of optimizing their IT environments based on the strengths of individual cloud providers or simply the product of a decentralized IT organization.

Media and Entertainment – Today’s media and entertainment landscape is increasingly composed of relatively small and specialized studios that meet the swelling content-production needs of the largest players, like Netflix and Hulu. Multi-cloud solutions enable these teams to work together on the same projects, access their preferred production tools from various public clouds, and streamline approvals without the delays associated with moving large media files from one site to another.

Transportation and Autonomous Driving – Connected car and autonomous driving projects generate immense amounts of data from a variety of sensors. Car manufacturers, public transportation agencies, and rideshare companies are among those motivated to take advantage of multi-cloud innovation, blending both accessibility of data across multiple clouds without the risks of significant egress charges and slow transfers, while maintaining the freedom to leverage the optimal public cloud services for each project.

Energy Sector – Multi-cloud adoption can help lower the significant costs associated with finding and drilling for resources. Engineers and data scientists can use machine learning (ML) analytics to identify places that merit more resources to prospect for oil, to gauge environmental risks of new projects, and to improve safety.

Multi-cloud disaster recovery pain points:

Not reading before you sign. Customers may face issues if they fail to read the fine print in their cloud agreements. The cloud provider is responsible for its computer infrastructure, but customers are responsible for protecting their applications and data. There are many reasons for application downtime that are not covered under cloud SLAs. Business critical workloads need high availability and disaster recovery protection software as well.

Developing a centralized protection policy. A centralized protection policy must be created to cover all data, no matter where it lives. Each cloud provider has its unique way of accessing, creating, moving and storing data, with different storage tiers. It can be cumbersome to create a disaster recovery plan that covers data across different clouds.

Reporting. This is important for ensuring protection of data in accordance with the service-level agreements that govern it. Given how quickly users can spin up cloud resources, it can be challenging to make sure you’re protecting each resource appropriately and identifying all data that needs to be incorporated into your DR plan.

Test your DR plan. Customers must fully screen and test their DR strategy. A multi cloud strategy compounds the need for testing. Some providers may charge customers for testing, which reinforces the need to read the fine print of the contract.

Resource skill sets. Finding an expert in one cloud can be challenging; with multi-cloud you will either need to find expertise in each cloud, or the rare individual with significance in multiple clouds.

Overcoming the multi-cloud DR challenge

Meeting these challenges requires companies to develop a data protection and recovery strategy that covers numerous issues. Try asking yourself the following strategic questions:

Have you defined the level of criticality for all applications and data? How much money will a few minutes of downtime for critical applications cost your organization in end user productivity, customer satisfaction, and IT labor?
Will data protection and recovery be handled by IT or application owners and creators in a self-service model?
Did you plan for data optimization, using a variety of cloud- and premises-based options?
How do you plan to recover data? Restoring data to cloud-based virtual machines or using a backup image as the source of recovery?

Obtain the right multi-cloud DR solution

The biggest key to success in data protection and recovery in a multi-cloud scenario is ensuring you have visibility into all of your data, no matter how it’s stored. Tools from companies enable you to define which data and applications should be recovered in a disaster scenario and how to do it – whether from a backup image or by moving data to a newly created VM in the cloud, for example.

The tool should help you orchestrate the recovery scenario and, importantly, test it. If the tool is well integrated with your data backup tool, it can also allow you to use backups as a source of recovery data, even if the data is stored in different locations – like multiple clouds. Our most recent SIOS webinar discusses this same point; watch it here if you’re interested. SIOS Datakeeper lets you run your business-critical applications in a flexible, scalable cloud environment, such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Azure, and Google Cloud Platform without sacrificing performance, high availability or disaster protection. SIOS DataKeeper is available in the AWS Marketplace and the only Azure certified high availability software for WSFC offered in the Azure Marketplace.

High Availability & the Cloud: The More You Know

October 25, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

High Availability & the Cloud: The More You Know

While researching reasons to migrate to the cloud, you’ve probably learned that the benefits of cloud computing include scalability, reliability, availability, and more. But what, exactly, do those terms mean? Let’s consider high availability (HA), as it is often the ultimate goal of moving to the cloud for many companies.

The idea is to make your products, services, and tools accessible to your customers and employees at any time from anywhere using any device with an internet connection. That means ensuring your critical applications are operational – even through hardware failures, software issues, human errors, and sitewide disasters – at least 99.99% of the time (that’s the definition of high availability).

While public cloud providers typically guarantee some level of availability in their service level agreements, those SLAs only apply to the cloud hardware. There are many reasons for application downtime that aren’t covered by SLAs. For this reason, you need to protect these applications with clustering software that will detect issues and reliably move operations to a standby server if necessary. As you plan what and how you will make solutions available in the cloud, remember that it is important that your products and services and cloud infrastructure are scalable, reliable, and available when and where they are needed.

Quick Stats on High Availability in the Cloud in 2021

Now that we’ve defined availability in the cloud context, let’s look at its impact on organizations and businesses. PSA, these statistics may shock you, but don’t fret. We’ve also got some solutions to these pressing and costly issues.

As much as 80% of Enterprise IT will move to the cloud by 2025 (Oracle).
The average cost of IT downtime is between $5,600 and $11,600 per minute (Gartner; Comparitech).
Average IT staffing to employee ratio is 1:27 (Ecityworks).
22% of downtime is the result of human error (Cloudscene).
In 2020, 54% of enterprises’ cloud-based applications moved from an on-premises environment to the cloud, while 46% were purpose-built for the cloud (Forbes).
1 in 5 companies don’t have a disaster recovery plan (HBJ).
70% of companies have suffered a public cloud data breach in the past year (HIPAA).
48% of businesses store classified information on the cloud (Panda Security).
96% of businesses experienced an outage in a 3-year period (Comparitech).
45% of companies reported downtime from hardware failure (PhoenixNAP).

What You Can Do – Stay Informed

If you are interested in learning the fundamentals of availability in the cloud or hearing about the latest developments in application and database protection, join us. The SIOS Cloud Availability Symposium is taking place Wednesday, September 22nd (EMEA) and Thursday, September 23rd (US) in a global virtual conference format for IT professionals focusing on the availability needs of the enterprise IT customer. This event will deliver the information you need on application high availability clustering, disaster recovery, and protecting your applications now and into the future.

Cloud Symposium Speakers & Sessions Posted

We have selected speakers presenting a wide range of sessions supporting availability for multiple areas of the data application stack. Check out the sessions posted and check back for additional presentations to be announced! Learn more

Register Now

Whether you are interested in learning the fundamentals of availability in the cloud or hearing about the latest developments in application and database protection, this event will deliver the information you need on application high availability clustering, disaster recovery, and protecting your applications now and into the future.

Reproduced from SIOS

12 Questions to Uncomplicate Your Cloud Migration

September 10, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

12 Questions to Uncomplicate Your Cloud Migration

Cloud migration best practices

The “cloud is becoming more complicated,” it was the first statement in an hour-long webinar detailing the changes and opportunities with the boom in cloud computing and cloud migration. The presenter continued with an outline of cloud related things that traditional IT is now facing in their journey to AWS, Azure, GCP or other providers.

There were nine areas that surfaced as complications in the traditional transition to cloud:

Definitions
Pricing
Networking
Security
Users, Roles, and Profiles
Applications and Licensing
Services and Support
Availability
Backups

As VP of Customer Experience for SIOS Technology Corp I’ve seen how the following areas can impact a transition to cloud. To mitigate these complications, consumers are turning to managed service providers, cloud solution architects, contractors and consultants, and a bevy of related services, guides, blog posts and related articles. Often in the process of turning to outside or outsourced resources the complications to cloud are not entirely removed. Instead, companies and the teams they have employed to assist or to transition them to cloud still encounter roadblocks, speed bumps, hiccups and setbacks.

Most often these complications and slowdowns in migrating to the cloud come from twelve unanswered questions:

What are our goals for moving to the cloud?
What is your current on-premise architecture? Do you have a document, list, flow chart, or cookbook?
Are all of your application, database, availability and related vendors supported on your target cloud provider platform?
What are your current on-premises risks and limitations? What applications are unprotected, what are the most common issues faced on-premises?
Who is responsible for the cloud architecture and design? How will this architecture and design account for your current definitions and the definitions of the cloud provider?
Who are the key stakeholders, and what are their milestones, business drivers, and deadlines for the business project?
Have you shared your project plan and milestones with your vendors?
What are the current processes, governance, and business requirements?
What is the migration budget and does it include staff augmentation, training, and services? What are your estimates for ongoing maintenance, licensing, and operating expenses?
What are your team’s existing skills and responsibilities?
Who will be responsible for updating governance, processes, new cloud models, and the various traditional roles and responsibilities?
What are the applications, services, or functions that will move from IaaS to SaaS models?

Know Your Goals for the Cloud

So, how will answering these twelve questions will improve your cloud migration. As you can see from the questions, understanding your goals for the cloud is the first, and most important step. It is nearly universally accepted that “a cloud service provider such as AWS, Azure, or Google can provide the servers, storage, and communications resources that a particular application will require,” but for many customers, this only eliminates “he need for computer hardware and personnel to manage that hardware.” Because of this fact, often customers are focused on equipment or data center consolidation or reduction, without considering that there are additional cloud opportunities and gaps that they still need to consider. For example, cloud does eliminate management of hardware, but it “does not eliminate all the needs that an application and its dependencies will have for monitoring and recovery,” so if your goal was to get all your availability from the cloud, you may not reach that goal, or it may require more than just moving on premises to an IaaS model. Knowing your goals will go a long way in helping you map out your cloud journey.

Know Your Current On-Premises Architecture

A second critical category of questions needed for a proper migration to the cloud, (or any new platform) is understanding the current on-premises architecture. This step not only helps with the identification of your critical applications that need availability, but also their underlying dependencies, and any changes required for those applications, databases, and backup solutions based on the storage, networking, and compute changes of the cloud. Answering this question is also a key step in assessing the readiness of your applications and solutions for the cloud and quantifying your current risks.

A third area that will greatly benefit from working through these questions occurs when you discuss and quantify current limitations. Frequently, we see this phase of discovery opening the door to limitations of current solutions that do not exist in the cloud. For example, recently our services team worked with a customer impacted by performance issues in their SQL database cluster. A SIOS expert assisting with their migration inquired about the solution and architecture, and VM sizing decisions. After a few moments, a larger more application sized instance was deployed correcting limitations that the customer had accepted due to their on-premise restrictions on compute, memory, and storage. Similarly we have worked with customers who were storage sensitive. They would run applications with smaller disks and a frequent resizing policy, due to disk capacity constraints. While storage costs should be considered, running with minimal margins can become a limitation of the past.

Understand Business and Governance Changes

The final group of questions help your team understand schedules, business impacts, deadlines, and governance changes that need to be updated or replaced because they may no longer apply in the cloud. Migrating to the cloud can be a smooth transition and journey. However, failing to assess where you are on the journey and when you need to complete the journey can make it into a nightmare. Understanding timing is important and can be keenly aided by considering stakeholders, application vendors, business milestones, and business seasons. Selfishly, SIOS Technology Corp. wants customers to understand their milestones because as a Service provider it minimizes the surprises. But, we also encourage customers to answer these questions as they often uncover misalignment between departments and stakeholders. The DBAs believes that the cutover will happen on the last weekend of the month, but Finance is intent on closing the books over the final weekend of the same month; or the IT team believes that cutover can happen on Monday, but the applications team is unavailable until Wednesday, and perhaps most importantly the legal team hasn’t combed through the list of new NDAs, agreements, licensing, and governance changes necessary to pull it all together.

As customers work through the questions, with safety and empathy, what often emerges is a puzzle of pieces, ownership, processes, and decision makers that needs to be put back together using the cloud provider box top and honest conversations on budget, staffing, training, and services. The end result may not be a flawless migration, but it will definitely be a successful migration.

For help with your cloud migration strategy and high availability implementation, contact SIOS Technology Corp.

– Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Learn more about common cloud migration challenges.

Read about some misconceptions about availability in the cloud.

Reproduced from SIOS

Migrating Applications To The Cloud

August 29, 2021 by Jason Aw Leave a Comment

Migrating Applications To The Cloud

How do we get there?

In your journey to the cloud and higher availability, consider the advice of author and entrepreneur Nilofer Merchant (having the one link below is fine).

In less than 72 hours, I’ve answered the same question multiple times: How do you get there? It started with one of my older daughters asking me how to get to a school-related appointment, followed by a younger child asking me what route we were taking to a store, and finally my oldest daughter asking me how to get to a particular destination somewhere in the state. They all asked the same question. But in each case, the context of the question and the expected answer was very different. As author and entrepreneur Nilofer Merchant says, a lot about the answer to the question ‘how do you get there?’ depends not only on your there, but also on your here.

What is your “here” with current applications?

The first step in figuring out how to move your application there (to the cloud, or to higher availability in the cloud) is to name “here” correctly. So, what’s your “here”? Your answer to this question can be as varied as the locations in my conversations with my daughters. One of my daughters asked from the context of our house. Another’s context was from a starting point in a different state, and the youngest was asking from a place of theory (hoping that we’d get milkshakes).

As you consider your definition and the details of “here” start by asking some basic questions:

What are your critical applications, and how are they protected?
Where are you in your deployment of high availability protection for your application?
How is your critical data protected?
What is the size of your current team?
How confident are you in your solutions and services for protecting your application and data?
Where are your critical enterprise systems and application workloads currently running?
If you are on-premises, is that an on-premises server, or virtual machine? Or is here a private cloud, or public cloud without HA?
What is your budget for the move to the cloud and for managing your application in the cloud moving forward?
What weariness, uncertainty, uneasiness, or dissatisfaction do you feel “here”?

Defining “here” is the starting point, which helps us feel our way towards a better “there,” so take your time. Think about what else shapes, defines, restricts, or exists within the parameters of your “here”? Is “here” a multi-product deployment, global IT Team infrastructure, or some other multiple location, multiple office arrangement? Are your teams globally distributed, outsourced, or a combination? If you looked at your “here” what things stand out, what are your team, company, product, or enterprise markers? What are the key and commonly recurring pain points, such as lack of training, missing redundancy, incomplete architecture guides, disappointment with the incumbent solutions, cloud complexity,

What’s your “there”? Private, public, hybrid or multi-cloud?

After you have figured out your “here”, the second step to lift from Merchant’s article is “figuring out what ‘there’ might be. As VP of Customer Experience, I have worked with a number of customers who want a “there” to be an environment with zero downtime, planned or unplanned, or one in which application failovers are seamless and complete within two minutes or less. Other customers have less lofty goals, seeking downtime that fits within a five (5) to nine (9) minute window, or who prefer longer windows with options for manual overrides based on responses to failure notifications. Still other customers want a “there” with better notifications, clear resolutions and recommendations, application-specific orchestration, and a way to augment their teams with experts from vendors and partners. So what are the key features of your ‘there’? What can you afford?

When you look over the painstaking answers of “here,” what stood out? What items from “here” need to be addressed to create a more desirable future version of your team, enterprise, availability, datacenter, and life. Does your “there” include more resiliency and redundancy, more application orchestration, better analytics, or lower costs? Where does private, public, hybrid, or multi-cloud figure into your “there”? How does your “here” improve because you have made it to “there.”

From “here” to “there”

The final step, according to Merchant, is “figuring the way we get from ‘here’ to ‘there’. If it is hard to be in your “here”, it only makes sense to put in the work to think about what “there” could be. In other words, think beyond simply moving your application to the cloud. Consider the resources and services you’ll need to create a result that meets all of your expectations. Think about the vendors, solution providers, services teams, and companies that specialize in purpose-built high availability solutions can help you get “there”.

Unlike my daughter’s “there”, there is no Waze for plotting a journey from “here” to “there” or cloud migrations. However, by carefully thinking through both your current situation, including your pains, frustrations, budget limitations, and your desired outcome, you can arrive at a solution that is more than a simple cloud migration. It can mean a more gratifying daily experience unencumbered by the fear of application failure and downtime and the hassle of troubleshooting and end-user complaints.

Taking Merchant’s advice when planning an application migration to the cloud can lead you to a wide range of possibilities from defining a more robust architecture, changing HA software solutions, engaging in services providers, moving to a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud, or other cloud model. It might even mean moving back to using your own datacenter.

For more than 20 years, SIOS has been helping companies implement high availability and disaster recovery protection for critical applications on premises, in the cloud and hybrid cloud environments. We can provide the expertise to help you through your application HA and DR journey from ‘here’ to ‘there’ and beyond. For more information, contact SIOS

– Cassius Rhue, VP, Customer Experience

Reproduced from SIOS