Tag Archives: Service Level Agreement (SLA)

Establishing Successful Cloud Computing Services

May 1, 2015 Sam Richardson

One method of ensuring that parties to a contract are on the same page as regards expectations and their fulfilment is the drawing up of service level agreements (SLAs). These agreements clearly specify what the vendor is willing to deliver and what the customer can expect to receive with reference to a cloud services contract. SLAs form an important management tool and are often formally negotiated and have specific metrics to quantify delivery of agreed services.

Before discussing the “how to” of establishing a successful business relationship in the cloud, let us quickly review the “bare minimum offering” in the cloud:

1. Readily available computing resources are exposed as a service;
2. The economic model is generally a pay-as-you-go service;
3. May or may not process data into meaningful contexts;
4. Limited guarantees on scalability, reliability and high availability;
5. Security systems are designed to be reasonably hacker proof;
6. Supports environmental goals by reducing carbon footprints;
7. Provides monitoring tools and metrics for evaluating services.

A quick think through, on the offerings of short listed cloud vendors, will establish the decision points for the relationship and the drafting of the SLA. The enterprise must have clarity on:

1. Whether the kind of service being offered by the vendor is the kind of service the enterprise needs?
2. Whether the definition of the “unit” measure of service is determined and can be monetised.
3. Whether the enterprise wants the service provider to process the data into meaningful contexts using compression or de-duplication technologies or it wants the data to be stored “as is where is”.
4. Whether the scalability, high availability and reliability can be truly obtained via the service. The enterprise must examine in some detail the technical claims being made by the service provider and feasibility thereof. A quick market research on the reputation of the vendor will also help in decision making.
5. Whether security guarantees are backed by industry best practises and third party certifications of cryptographic algorithms and user acceptance.
6. Whether green computing options are strictly enforced by the vendor and
7. Whether the service monitoring tools provided will truly reflect the level of service being provided by the vendor.

We, at Backup Technology, believe in working with our customers in a trustful relationship. The Service Level Agreements (SLAs) we design is guaranteed to satisfy the most stringent monitoring requirements and reflects the kind of relationship we seek to establish with our customers.

Top Ten Reasons to Leave your Cloud Backup Service Provider – Part II

April 29, 2015 Damien Garvey

In Part I, we discussed the five reasons that would make you leave your cloud backup vendor. They included:

1/ The lack of all operating systems support, mobile device support;
2/ Too much focus on appliances;
3/ Agreements not being executed as per SLAs;
4/ Confusing pricing structures; and
5/ Treating archived data and active data same way.

Continuing on this list, the remaining five reasons are:

6/ Bandwidth – Does your vendor throttle your bandwitdth connections? Remember that it takes days and weeks to recover data from an online depositories; and your Internet connection should be fast. Your backup vendor needs to optimise their bandwidth using the latest technologies for better data transfer in your network.

7/ Data Centre Location – At least one copy of your data should always be stored far away from your primary source data. It is recommended that your secondary storage to at least be 2,000 miles away from your primary location. Does this vendor have a geo-dispersed secondary data centre?

8/ Vendor Lock – Is there flexibility for your data? Do you have the ability to backup your data in private, public, or hybrid or a combination of two or more? Is it possible to deploy a third party solution as add on, for instance, salesforce.com, Google Apps, etc?

9/ DRaaS – Disaster Recovery as a Service is not offered by this vendor due to the limitations of the software. In case of a disaster, you need to make sure that your data becomes available quickly and that you are covered for disaster recovery and business continuity. Your vendor always talks about backup and avoids discussing recovery. If DRaaS is not provided, how are you going to recover after a disaster hits? You must be able to instantly access critical data within minutes of a disaster.

10/ Periodic Research of the Vendor – Relationship stays healthy if it is monitored. You need to research about your vendor periodically. If too many complaints are published on the web, or at the local better business bureau (BBB) or at the consumer protection agency, it is a clear indication what is happening at the company. Check to see if the vendor is engaged in the industry. Does the vendor issue frequent meaningful press releases? Does it participate in forums and webinars? Does the vendor post educational blogs and articles on a regular intervals? How about case studies and whitepapers? Any social media activities?

Conclusion
Business relationships are critical for both a vendor and a client to be happy and stay in the relationship. Vendors should be responsible to delivering quality services as agreed to in the SLAs. Service providers should be able to deliver the same quality service to all clients no matter how small or big an organisation is; especially, in the case of a disaster or a virus attack. The vendor should try their best to understand the clients business needs, goals and challenges (including the IT competency levels) and work with you efficiently.

Top Ten Reasons to Leave your Cloud Backup Service Provider – Part I

April 27, 2015 Damien Garvey

Business relationships are important. You have done your homework. You have researched and tested several solutions and settled on one that you thought was a great cloud backup vendor. Before you picked this company, you considered several factors, such as: technology, experience, financial status, reputation, security, compliance, support, certification, scalability, and trust. But, now, the vendor is taking it all for granted and is providing you with substandard services, resulting in not so good relationship.

Is your relationship with your cloud backup vendor healthy? If your business relationship starts to show some signs of stress, chances are the relationship will die at one point. Perhaps, it is time for you to gauge your business relationship. If you notice any or all of the following points, you might be in a bad relationship:

1/ Data Backup – the company doesn’t backup all of your data across all operating systems, and on mobile devices. Are you using various backup solutions across operating systems (iOS, Windows, etc.) and across mobile devices?

2/ Appliance – Is the vendor appliance centric? Do you find yourself spending more than what you planned for appliances? Is the vendor requesting you to acquire additional appliances to match with your backed up data? Relying heavily on appliances might not be an ideal solution. Cloud centric solutions, however, offer unlimited scaling when your data grows. Is your data being tethered to an appliance instead, and as a result, forcing you to delete data and/or buy bigger appliance to gain extra space for your growing data?

3/ SLA – Service Level Agreements are very important. SLAs have a purpose and that is why a great deal of effort is put into preparing them. Does the vendor execute per signed and approved SLA?

4/ Price – the price the vendor is charging you varies all the time, and is complicated, and you can not figure out how the pricing model works. Is it per GB of raw or compressed data? Do you get credit for not recovering data, say, in the past one year?

5/ BLM – Does your vendor treats all data the same and back them all up in the same vault? Keep in mind that all data has the same value. The older a data gets, the less important it becomes. So, mission-critical data should be stored separately with clearly defined RTO and RPO while less important data should be stored in less expensive vaults. Intelligent software have the ability to automatically segment the data into these two tiers.

If you decide to move your services to a new vendor, make sure that you don’t end up with the same problems as the vendor you just switched from. Insist on asking the new vendor to help with the data migration, at least consultation help. Remember that choosing a cloud backup service provider is not a simple task; and the vendor you choose could end up causing you to go out of business.

In Part II, we will discuss other five factors that affect your relationship with your vendor, such as bandwidth throttling; data centre location; vendor lock-in; DRaaS; and periodic vendor research results.

Test the Cloud—Trials are for Free—Part I

January 9, 2015 Damien Garvey

You do not have to buy anything before you convince yourself that the cloud is ‘just what you need’. Download trial versions of different cloud services and see how your applications and workloads perform before you take the next step of accepting or rejecting cloud computing.

Getting the best out of the trial version of cloud software (any software for that matter) requires some effort and hard work on your part. You need to have an exact and accurate idea of your data loads, workflows, backup and recovery requirements, time frames, reporting requirements, disaster recovery compulsions, recovery point objectives (RPO), recovery time objectives (RTO) and so on. Without this information, launching on a trial is as good as useless.

If you have ascertained all of the above, you are ready for your trial. You need to use simulated or actual data to create the right computing environment you are likely to use. You may like to replicate the effort by downloading trials from more than one cloud service provider, so that you have the data for comparison. You may like to conduct extensive research in parallel on what the cloud service offers you—the enterprise—in the service level agreement (SLA) and what kind of reputation does the service provider have, etc., while you are busy simulating your computing environment over the Internet hands-on.

Experts recommend that it is best to start small and then go full hog. They would rightly advise you to migrate non-critical systems first and then a few critical systems to see what kind of performance metrics you get. Appointing a test group for the purpose of the test is generally a very good idea. They can keep a record of the performance and the problems experienced during the trial.

Ideally, the trial should be a three to six-month trial. Many cloud vendors will allow you the luxury if they think you are a big customer—they cannot afford to lose—or you are a very serious customer, who will ultimately subscribe to their services. Otherwise, most trial versions are available for free for a period of 30 days.

Make sure, that the trial versions you are downloading are fully functional. A few vendors bar some features from the trial version and this can be very annoying. You may not be able to fully test the potential of the software during the trial.

Part II of this article is found here: Testing the Cloud –Trials, are for Free— Part II

Integrate your Systems if you are Moving to the Cloud

January 7, 2015 Rob Mackle

Moving to the cloud is not a simple three-step process that it is made out to be. If you have very little data, you may follow the steps and get on to the cloud. But, most organisations have voluminous data and there is a lot of work to be done with the data before you can take the first step towards the cloud. Your systems must be integrated if you are moving to the cloud.

What does integration mean? Integrated systems are pre-configurations of data, storage, networks, applications and their management, to deliver optimal performance in the cloud. The process involves understanding the different system components and how they work together before configuring them. Workloads may be identified, optimised for each application, and a broad range of infrastructures may be requisitioned for obtaining a specific pre-defined, level of performance. Capabilities for managing the application and the workload will have to be clearly set out. Thereafter, different application requirements may be fine tuned, balanced, until realistic performance measures are obtainable and available.

The pre-configured data centre exported to the cloud then creates the environment for speedy delivery of applications and resources. Flexibility and scalability are automatic, allowing the business to expand infinitely, bringing in more customers, and adding more information to their digital repositories. Multiple operating systems can be hosted and applications can be shared among a large number of users, wherever they are located, and these applications can be deployed on a variety of devices that may be used to connect to the enterprise account.

Service portfolios can be expanded to include a wide range of business services that induce confidence in the company. These benefits alone are enough to validate the need for pre-integration and fine-tuning of enterprise applications and systems before cloud migrations. Add to this the cost savings that occur and all arguments against pre-integration activities must cease to be voiced. Of course, the success of integration will be in direct proportion to the willingness of the organisation to spend the time and effort required for the process and the level of standardisation that they are eager to implement. A healthy services centric view and a felt need for effective Service Level Agreement (SLA) management will act as catalysts that help transform legacy data centres into efficient cloud data centre, humming with activity and delivering performance.

You Add Value to Public Clouds

December 17, 2014 Sam Richardson

Public clouds are suspect—irrespective of whether or not the suspicion is justified or otherwise. Hence, the adoption of the public cloud has been slow. But, the change is becoming visible, as more and more concerns about the public cloud are addressed, and the public cloud assumes its rightful place as a mode of computing that adds value to the business.

What is the value add that is to be obtained from public clouds? The value add from public clouds is in direct proportion to the commitment the organisation feels towards managing the cloud provider and employing the cloud solution responsibly and effectively. In other words, the responsibility for the success of the public cloud rests with the organisation and not with the cloud vendor.

If this seems to be counter-intuitive and contrary to all that you have heard about the cloud, it is the truth. Public clouds do decrease costs and do deliver all kinds of benefits to the end user. But, it brings with it a number of responsibilities:

IT professionals within the organisation must stay with the cloud and its implementation. They must make the effort to understand the terms and conditions of the contract and enforce any remedies that may be built into the contract to ensure efficient performance of contact by the cloud vendor. If the public cloud performance is poor, the IT personnel within the organisation are to blame.
The objective of the public cloud is not just backup and recovery. There is a whole gamut of activities that happen in between. Establishing the metrics and monitoring performance is a business imperative for IT managers. Unmonitored public clouds can cause untold difficulties for end users. Latency, seek time issues or even backup and recovery issues may plague the organisation and make the whole experience of the cloud unpleasant.
Availability and security are promises of the cloud vendor. But, untested security can be dangerous. IT managers will have to repeatedly test the security systems and run disaster recovery exercises to ensure that everything promised is deliverable and can be delivered at the appropriate time and at the pace required.
Nothing can be managed without appropriate tools. IT managers need to ensure that the cloud service provides the managers with the right tools for the right tasks. There should be tools for scheduling backups and recoveries. There should be tools for managing users, stores or archives. There should be tools for generating and analysing reports on user activity or system activity. Finally, there should be tools for verifying service level agreements (SLAs) and implementations.

It should be remembered that Cloud service providers do not understand your business. They only understand their own business. It is up to you to make sure that their tools are used to your benefit.