We at The Virtualization Practice, LLC have migratedg our business critical applications to the cloud. How simple was that task? It was not as easy as we have heard from others, and not as difficult as some have had, but it was not as simple as move my VM and run. Why is this? What are the methods available to move to the cloud? How do they stack up to what actually happens. Theory is all well and good, and I have read plenty of those architectures, but when the shoe leather hits the cloud where are we? Here is a short history, a comparison of methods, and some conclusions that can be drawn from our migration to the cloud.
TVP Tag Archives
Cloud Products and Services
Cloud products and services are only in its infancy but new and exciting technology is being released at an incredible rate. One example of something new is Kim Dotcom’s newly launched Mega cloud storage service with its free 50GBs of storage. What really got my attention with this announcement was that the data would be stored encrypted, which is nice to see security being built into the offering from the beginning. There are a few bugs that are being reported, but hopefully the start of the push to secure the cloud.
Evaluating Clouds
When evaluating clouds there are three major criteria that are used first before we get into the nitty gritty of how the system works. The criteria is not always in writing but it is in the back of everyone’s mind and in many cases are nebulous to define. Herein, I will try to look at those criteria in order to aid others in making the same decisions I have had to make lately while evaluating clouds.
Change: Moving to the Cloud
The Virtualization Practice will be moving from our internal virtual environment and cloud configuration to an external hosted cloud configuration, at least temporarily. However, what we have found is that not all clouds are alike (we all knew that), and that some of our processes were not cloud friendly but what does it mean for moving to the cloud? How does this impact our ability to migrate our data, applications, and management into the cloud?
Moving to the Cloud: When Does It Make Sense?
On 12/18, I had an interesting twitter conversation with Mark Thiele (@mthiele10) about moving to the cloud based on cost. There is a cost perspective to consider as cloud services can be very expensive. When does it make sense to go to the cloud, I think there are two scenarios to consider when talking about going to the cloud. While we were hampered by 140 characters, I think the message is clear.
Offering Cloud Services: Why is it so Limited?
There are many SaaS and Security SaaS cloud services out there, but they all lack one thing: full visibility. Why do these cloud offerings limit the ability to perform compliance auditing, forensics, and basic auditing against an organizations data retention, protection, and other necessary policies? Why not just grant the “right to audit”, or better yet, build a way for each tenant to perform their own audit down to the hardware? Why limit this by leaving it out of contracts as well as the technology? It is all feasible.