I’ve posted before about Cloud computing best practices , and I’m doing it again now (and for the next several posts) for a couple of reasons:
- Cloud computing continues to (quickly) evolve, and while some Cloud best practices stay more or less constant, others must be adapted to keep pace,
- Cloud success depends on adhering to best practices — so there’s no such thing as talking too much about them or the order in which they should be applied.
So I’m starting with the most basic Cloud best practice: Understanding Cloud capabilities, so you can get a sense of which are likeliest to make a difference in your organization. Here’s my list of what perhaps I should refer to as the six wonders of the Cloud world:
- Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) — at the heart of any Cloud environment is a comprehensive, integrated Cloud infrastructure that exploits virtualization and autonomic management synergies (automation + orchestration) and provides end-to-end security and virtual machine isolation,
- Desktop as a Service (DaaS) — enables rapid deployment of desktops on virtually any device with the software, storage, and access that you specify while avoiding the upfront costs and complexity of traditional desktop virtualization,
- Data Protection/Security as a Service — effectively identifies, monitors, and protects data in use, data in motion, and data at rest, and enforces policies to ensure protection,
- Disaster Recovery/Business Continuity as a Service (DRaaS) — backs up your data and apps to a safe, highly secure remote location, provides highly available and reliable virtualized data storage with advanced replication and restore functionalities so you can remain operational throughout any disruption,
- Messaging & Collaboration as a Service —enables real-time collaboration, especially via HD videoconferencing , between participants located anywhere, using a wide range of devices, including tablet and smartphones, often with support for a wide range of other related capabilities, and
- Application Development/Test as a Service — powers a software development/test environment where real-world conditions can be simulated without compromising day-to-day IT operations or incurring the cost of having to scale up your on-premise infrastructure.
Next time, I’ll focus on what’s involved in doing a Cloud provider feasibility assessment .
