Cloud, Datacenter, Data Protection Services | Venyu Blog

Over Memorial Day weekend Sirius XM Satellite Radio ran a marathon of the late comedian George Carlin’s best stand-up routines. Now, this being a G-rated blog I can’t repeat most of what was said, however, the news I found recently on the nationalization of cloud computing in Oceania (that’s Australia to you and me and, as Rush would add, those in Rio Linda), inspired me to consider what George would think of this if he was still alive (and was tech-savvy). So here’s my chance to channel George on the subject of clouds and cloud computing….

“We’ve got all kinds of clouds. Cumulus, cirrus, even nimbus. Frankly I can’t tell one from the other, and generally the only way you tell them apart is by what shape they resemble. You know, that one up there looks like my Aunt Matilda after Thanksgiving dinner, face down in the giblets and that one there looks like my brother-in-law Oswald after three months of living on my couch.  Notice how his legs are draped over the elbow rests with his hands still wrapped around the remote control. And that brings us to an entirely new kind of cloud. But instead of holding raindrops these clouds hold data. Now everyone knows a cloud not only has a silver lining because hey, that’s how you know it’s a cloud but now every business has one too. For example, the airline industry has a cloud so now all the airlines will know how late your flight is running. Which makes the people who run the airline you’re flying on feel better about themselves because, hey, the next airline over from them is running late too. Misery loves company, right? And we all know how much fun it is sitting on the tarmac, right?  How about a passenger only cloud? Why not let everyone know how much fun you’re having as the bathrooms run over and the peanuts run out? Even Wall Street has a cloud, that’s right Wall Street, where the 1% is busy making decisions for the 99%. But now these traders can keep an eye on each other to figure out how to move as much money as possible into their own portfolios while keeping it out of the hands of the rest of us. Never mind charges of collusion, this is capitalism and as Michael Douglas said in that movie, greed is good. And now, now we have a National Cloud. Imagine that a National Cloud. Not in this country, mind you, but in Australia. You know, the land of kangaroos, home to the aborigines, the marginalized first people of Australia and shrimp-on-the-barbie. Turns out the Communications Minister of Australia will soon move all of the government’s public-facing websites to the cloud to help increase the adoption of cloud computing throughout the country. They’re calling this movement a ‘national cloud computing strategy.’ Sounds vaguely important doesn’t it? Sort of like Cloud First here in the good old USA. But, of course, that’s not working out as well, is it? You know how our government moves don’t you?, It doesn’t leap, it kind of lumbers. Let me take a moment to set the scene. You have this bureaucrat stuck somewhere in a cubicle, not wanting to share his stuff, or in this case data with other people he either doesn’t like or doesn’t trust. This is my data and you can’t have it. And I don’t want to put it into the cloud. After all, where is this cloud and why can’t I see it? If I’m going to move my data there shouldn’t I be able to see it at all times? What if someone asks me for my data back and I don’t know what cloud it’s been moved to? What do you say then? Sorry Mary, I moved your records to the cloud and I’m not sure which cloud they’re in. They could be in that cloud up there, or that fluffy one over there, I’m really not sure. Can I get back to you on that? You see now why Australia is on the right path. By having one cloud, a national cloud everyone uses the same cloud, kind of like unisex bathrooms. We all know which cloud to send data to because everyone sends it to the same cloud. What a concept. The nationalized cloud. Kind of like another place to store your stuff while you’re out getting more stuff or in this case data. I don’t know whether we’re ready for a national cloud in the land of Lincoln, Reagan and all the other politicos that run this country, but one thing’s for sure, if we had a national, government controlled cloud one thing for sure wouldn’t change. The government would still know what you were doing, with whom, and for how long, but this time, we would be able to keep an eye on them and from where I sit, it’s about time someone watched them as much as they watch us. So look skyward to the clouds. You can’t touch them. In fact, you can’t even see them. But you know they’re there, and nationalized or not, frankly they’re not going away any time soon. For starters, just ask Australia.”

I miss you George.

For more information on the National Cloud of Australia, browse to here.

Some blog posts are educational. Others tantalize. Still others are just plain fun. And then there are those that recognize achievement. Like this one does.

On May 7^th in Las Vegas, during its annual awards ceremony, Network Products Guide (NPG) – the industry’s leading technology research and advisory guide – recognized Venyu with two of its premier honors in the “2013 Hot Companies and Best Products Awards.”

The coveted “Hot Companies and Best Products” program encompasses the world’s best in organizational performance, products and services, executives and management teams, successful deployments, product management and engineering, support and customer satisfaction, and public relations. Venyu captured two of the top awards — “Hot Companies” and “Best Products” — in the Cloud Computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) category.

The complete text of the press release can be found here.

At this point please allow me the opportunity to briefly remove my agnostic accouterments (or my virtual, and mostly independent hat) and swap it for the Venyu one and call your attention to the advantages of considering Venyu for your company’s cloud backup and recovery strategy. These include:

VenyuCloud: Venyu’s enterprise-grade cloud computing platform is flexible and can meet the demands of many diverse sets of needs. vCloud is capable of meeting most size, I/O, bandwidth, scalability and security requirements.

RestartIT Backup & Recovery – Representing the first 2 critical steps of a Disaster Recovery (DR) plan, online data backup automatically backs up changed data and secures it to geographically diverse, commercial-grade datacenters in the same step. Should a disaster occur, your data is quickly exported to a portable disk device (Mobile Vault) to be expedited to your recovery site next day or sooner.

Ok, independent, free-thinking hat back on my virtual head.

So, what does this all mean?  It all depends, I suppose, on the optics you’re using.

Now, as an unbiased blogger I can’t tell you what singular managed service provider or mix of providers will best suit your company’s needs in the here and now, and as you traverse the sometimes difficult journey from start-up SMB to profitable, market share leader in your industry. As is true in most human interactions, not every possible outcome can ever properly or sufficiently be perceived all at once, and frankly market forces and in some cases sheer plain luck often plays a part. Some success, of course, can be planned for, but most of it depends on a wide array of circumstances, events and frankly signed, long-term contracts with satisfied customers.  Still, there is an upside to this otherwise fragile house of cards.

For example, a popular idiom in today’s IT industry is the term “Purpose-Built,” mostly applied, in context, to data centers where the hardware and the people that support it can be remote to one another, and yet still capture value on behalf of the business.

On that count it seems to me that when you get right down to it, a cloud solution that enables you to backup the lifeblood of your business (e.g. data) and to rapidly recover it in the face of man-made or natural disasters is pretty much “purpose-built.” It enables you to store, share and shepherd your data over the cloud and ensure its safe return in an on-demand convention that best suits the needs of your business. Effectively, cause and effect.

To bring this post to a close and the gravitas these industry awards convey full circle, by my estimation the Network Products Guide is not only recognizing Venyu as a leader in this increasingly crowded cloud space, but also ― among all other conferees ― the validation that cloud-based backup and DR in general is not just a trend that will eventually peter out and come to nothing. But rather (to my point), that cloud is a sturdy, purpose-built, vehicle designed to deliver great results by great companies for great companies. Not just in the here and now, but also in the long-term future.

The following post is culled from a ZDNet article on the results of the Uptime Institute’s Server Roundup, a competition based on the numbers of servers decommissioned and resources saved while businesses upgrade and repurpose their datacenter infrastructures.

AOL finished at the top of the list in 2012, decommissioning 8,253 servers that resulted in savings of nearly $3,000,000 after decommissioning 10,000 servers in 2011. . Second-place finisher Barclay’s, the financial institution, was able to save over $4,000,000 in power and maintenance costs, but decommissioned only 5,515 servers.

The Uptime Institute Server Roundup contest was introduced in October 2011 to encourage the removal and recycling of obsolete IT equipment in an effort to decrease data center energy use. Decommissioning a single 1U rack server can result in a savings of $500 per year in energy costs, an additional $500 in operating system licenses, and $1,500 in hardware maintenance costs.

And here’s where it gets interesting. According to the rules, “Two winners will be determined, one for most IT equipment removed, one for largest percentage of IT equipment removed. We don’t care how you get there. Going virtual? Consolidating servers? Moving to the cloud? We don’t care. Just unplug and decommission those machines.”

This is where the leap of faith comes in. That suggestion of outcomes to contestants: going virtual, moving to the cloud. Although neither is specifically called out for the winning companies the inference is that decommissioning servers, especially in today’s data centers, are more often than not the result of going virtual or moving to the cloud. It’s the new normal, soon to be mainstream.  It’s an irrevocable, irrefutable condition of data and server administration here in 2013.

As David Chernicoff suggests in the ZDNet post, “Considering how tight IT and datacenter budgets are, that is significant cost savings that saves funds to be better applied to improving business performance.”

While it is unlikely (and quoting Chernicoff here), that you have thousands of servers sitting and idling in your network now, there is a fairly good likelihood that more than 10 percent of your servers are severely underutilized, even in small datacenters. Industry reports peg the percentage of underutilized servers at an average over 50 percent of the machines in any datacenter. Given the potential cost savings for even a few decommissioned servers, isn’t it worth the effort to get a good grip on how the servers in your datacenter are being used?

Maybe it’s time to take your own leap of faith.

Not every army travels on its stomach. In fact, it might be said that the U.S. Army, or its intelligence information at least, is now traveling by cloud.

Not that innovation comes slowly to Uncle Sam’s charges. In fact, according to this article in Cloud Times, the U.S. Army, in 1994, was responsible for the development of GPS technology, which initially started out life as a technology exclusive to the military.

Fast Forward to 2013 where a privately-held solutions provider, High Performance Technologies, Inc is helping the federal government design and implement a private cloud that will convey the latest intelligence information to US troops in Afghanistan, in real or near-real time.

In addition, the U.S. Army is also leveraging Big Data so that forward operating bases can also double as local nodes that collect data from UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones) or other sources. The cloud, in fact, went live in March 2011 following extensive testing and proof of concept by the Army that the cloud can really meet their needs when it comes to handling “intel” analysis, processing, and production.

As reported in the article, the Distributed Common Ground System-Army (DCGS-A) will take 9 different IT systems for intelligence gathering and analysis and deploy them into a single cloud-based architecture. The DCGS-A will serve as a direct replacement for the various stovepiped systems that the military has been using to collect and analyze intelligence data. The main problem with the old systems is that they tend to use proprietary data formats, which means they are not interoperable. The new replacement will speak a language that’s common across the intelligence community.

The DCGS-A has already received the greenlight from the Pentagon and the system is already fully compliant with the common architecture for IT systems in the overall intelligence community. Although there are reportedly still some kinks in the top secret corners of the system – incongruities that are scheduled to be tested in the second half of 2013, during the US Army’s Network Integration Evaluation—once the new iteration passes the Army’s testing, it will get deployed as a replacement for all the legacy systems that have been filling out the gaps.

Who says the government moves too slowly, a lumbering superstructure impeded by massive bureaucracy and red tape? Seems to me that whether you’re talking about private or public sector, the cloud is a cure for even the most  entrenched, embattled and otherwise aloof organizations, enabling them to move faster and more intelligently, no matter how contentious the opposition or how distant the fight.

In this blog we’ve discussed community clouds with some regularity, including in 2011 the story behind the New York Stock Exchange partnering with EMC Corp and VMWare to create a community cloud that allows financial institutions direct access to NYSE’s technology services. Through its, (at the time, at least), newly developed Capital Markets Community Platform (CMCP), Wall Street firms that sign up for the platform can use NYSE Technologies’ servers to gain access to research, including historical market data and analytics that previously was stored on individual firms’ networks.

The upshot, according to Feargal O’Sullivan, vice president of platform development at NYSE Technologies, a division of NYSE, was a platform that lowers the cost of entry for smaller firms, because they don’t need to buy servers, ship them and install them.” And, significantly, “we’re building a community with like-minded firms that want to trade with each other,” adding that NYSE already has a connection to “almost every financial services firm in the world.”

Flash forward to spring 2013. And this post by Chuck Hollis of EMC, which describes how the platform (now known as The NYSE Techologies Community Cloud) has succeeded on a range of fronts, the predominant concept is that the security and isolation mechanisms are derived from the financial industry, rather than the cloud industry. As Hollis writes, “on the NYSE cloud, you know exactly who your neighbors are, and what they’re doing.”  And, since everyone in the community has largely the same requirements, NYSE can create a precisely targeted and differentiated offer that can’t be easily replicated.”

The appeal and advantages include:  (a) far lower entry costs to a world-class infrastructure, operations and application support environment, (b) predictable unit costs for what’s consumed, (c) expedited access to rich information feeds and application sets that are highly relevant, and (d) access to a community of like-minded people who can share and collaborate as a community.

In essence, the playing field has been effectively leveled in the capital markets industry: everyone now has access to the same level of purpose-built IT capabilities. As a result the NYSE has now attracted It’s no wonder they now have several hundred customers: spanning the range from smaller outfits to some very big brand names as well; where, in 2011, it had a grand total of four upon the community cloud’s inception.

For the NYSE key benefits of its community cloud platform include:

Fast Time to Market. The Community Platform provides rapid provisioning of access to hundreds of buy-side and sell-side traders around the world, historical and real-time information, and technology services that enable trading innovations.

Highly scalable. The Community Platform is built to handle your growth and changing requirements globally.

Simplified access to a broad range of services. The Community Platform offers rapid access to the entire NYSE Technologies portfolio of high performance, low-latency services as well as offerings from third-party vendors.

Lower Costs. You no longer have to provide the resources to develop and to maintain your infrastructure that does not supply an inherent competitive advantage.

World Class Security. The Community Platform technology is hosted in our ultra-secure Global Liquidity Centers.

Flexible Solutions to Differing Market Needs. The Community Platform is an agile solution built to meet the needs of differing market participants.

Other Industries, Other Clouds

I don’t know who said it first but nothing succeeds like success. As Hollis suggests there are other industries  — things like energy exploration, life sciences and even utilities — that could benefit from aggregating data and resources to a community cloud. He offers the following guidelines in approaching a community cloud construct:

- the activity must be very demanding from a compute and information perspective;
- entry costs to achieve critical mass must be quite high;
- greater-than-average concerns about security, availability, governance and compliance;
- a good degree of information sharing from common sources and feeds;
- a reasonable consistency in the applications being used by the community;
- a desire to compete-yet-collaborate through interactions with other community members

From my perspective the ability to scale and to increase efficiencies among like-minded companies and organizations through a common cloud community construct is compelling.

Granted, this isn’t something for every industry, however, given the sheer volume of data under which most of the world’s servers are encumbered and the number of human resources dedicated to support just their day-to-day operations, for select industries — trading, aviation and others — a community cloud for the C-level suite, the IT teams that support them and the shareholders and customers to whom they must ultimately answer, this outcome may not be just pie-in-the-sky thinking.

And through the example of the NYSE Technologies Community Cloud we now have conclusive proof of both its advantages as well as its benefits.

You and I could probably trade soundbites (wordstrings?) all day long on the benefits of cloud computing — everything from cost containment — things like buying fewer servers — to optimizing human, as well as capital resources. Still, no matter how many reasons we would come up, I’m confident the theme of business continuity would permeate the resulting discussion. In fact, enabling BCP/DR (Business Continuity Planning/Disaster Recovery) by leveraging the cloud’s on-demand attributes is simply the best way to ensure your business stays up and running regardless of natural or man-made (e.g. unplanned downtime) events.

There are two sides to this discussion, technical as well as business. Due to space limitations I recommend to you Tom Olzak’s excellent post on Tech Republic. His detailed descriptions of some of the more technical concepts behind business continuity, including MTPOD (Maximum Tolerable Period of Disruption); MTTR (Mean Time To Repair) and RTO (Recovery Time Objectives) adeptly illuminates both their interdependencies as well as their impact for most ecosystems.

So with the technical concepts in hand, let’s move on to the business case.

As outlined by Daniel Beazer in this cloudtweaks post, it’s one thing for websites to go down, it’s another thing completely for applications that house critical data to suddenly be inaccessible. This is true where the stakes of unavailable data or applications can be especially profound, such as in healthcare, eCommerce platforms or SaaS/PaaS providers.

Yet in spite of the high probability of natural and unnatural disasters, many businesses still leave their data at risk from being lost. As Beazer writes, “in an era when about everything lives in the cloud, BCP can no longer be left on the back burner.”  He goes on to suggest the following ways businesses can leverage the cloud for smarter BCP. These include:

Resources on Demand. Historically, BCP was an onerous undertaking: ordering new hardware, provisioning circuits and signing contracts with a colocation provider could literally take months. The cloud removes all of those steps. Organizations can literally spin up a virtualized machine within minutes in another location, resulting in very little to no downtime.

The instant spin up and switch down aspect of the cloud is particularly handy when preparing for seasonal events like hurricanes. These tend to hit the coast at about the same time every year and subside a couple of months later. An IT director could replicate his environment a month before the hurricane season starts, stand it up in a region that is untouched by hurricanes (like Arizona), and turn the deployment down a month or two later.

Moreover, better and more resources for efficient failover means cloud infrastructure is perfect for replicating applications and databases across a multitude of environments and geographically diverse infrastructure. This enablement means enterprises can easily redirect their traffic to any number of failover facilities using DNS management, thus greatly lowering the risk. Tornado risk in the mid-west? Move the workload to an east coast cloud node. Hurricane risk on the east coast? Replicate the workload to a cloud node in Arizona. Earthquake risk in California? Re-locate to a node in Texas. None of this is a hassle with cloud infrastructure.

Redundancy no longer costs an arm and a leg. Cost has been a huge factor that prevents businesses of every size from implementing effective business continuity plans. The cloud makes this a moot (or at least much more palatable) point.

Hot / Cold business continuity configuration. When the cloud is used for BC solutions, resources like processors, RAM, and storage allocations can remain practically dormant until the moment the business needs them, at which time, these resources can be scaled up quickly to manage the production load. A cloud business continuity solution can be deployed so quickly that active users (on the website or application) don’t even notice a blip. With cloud, enterprises and SMBs alike can now have BC plans with global infrastructure in place without breaking the budget.

Hot / Hot business continuity configuration. DNS management tools enable IT stakeholders to mirror a production hosting environment, in its entirety, to a secondary location. The geo-location features of DNS can play a role here too, providing a performance boost as requests can be routed via load-balancing to the most local production node. Running two deployments ‘live-live’ where Web servers and possibly even data base servers share the load between the two locations, is a good option for highly transactional businesses, where even a moment of interruption leads to revenue loss.

In sum, Beazer asserts that cloud can be a game changer for IT, lowering the price of business continuity solutions, while simultaneously providing more businesses better access to robust and protective options quickly. And, I might add, the ability to confidently maintain website uptime as well as application availability.

For a first person discussion on business continuity, read here on how the NBA’s New Orleans Hornets basketball team was able to rebound quickly from the effects of Hurricane Katrina by leveraging Venyu’s BCP/DR solutions; or, if you’re a subscriber, browse to the story, “Rebounding After Disaster” in the March 1 hard copy edition of CIO magazine.

What little I know about manufacturing could fit on the surface of a thimble.

For example, I know it was Henry Ford who incorporated the Ford Motor Company in 1903, proclaiming, “I will build a car for the great multitude.” In October 1908, he did so, offering the Model T for $950. In the Model T’s nineteen years of production, its price dipped as low as $280. Nearly 15,500,000 were sold in the United States alone. The Model T heralds the beginning of the Motor Age; the car evolved from luxury item for the well-to-do to essential transportation for the ordinary man.

Ford revolutionized manufacturing. By 1914, his Highland Park, Michigan plant, using innovative production techniques, could turn out a complete chassis every 93 minutes. This was a stunning improvement over the earlier production time of 728 minutes. Using a constantly-moving assembly line, subdivision of labor, and careful coordination of operations, Ford realized huge gains in productivity.

So imagine my surprise (my delight, really), to learn (as found on Forbes.com), the “10 ways cloud computing is revolutionizing manufacturing.”

According to the article, manufacturers are under constant pressure to increase accuracy, make process speed a competitive force and capitalize on their internal intelligence and knowledge to make every supplier, distributor and service interaction count.

In turn, cloud-based strategies give these companies the chance to bring their own innate intelligence and knowledge into every sales situation. While on-premise systems could also do this, cloud-based systems were quicker to roll out, easier to customize and showed potential to increase adoption rates across resellers.

These strategies include:

• Capturing and applying company-wide intelligence and knowledge through the use of analytics, business intelligence (BI), and rules engines. For the many manufacturers who rely on build-to-order, configure-to-order and engineer-to-order strategies as a core part of their business models, using cloud-based platforms to capture knowledge and manage rules is accelerating. A key part of this area is mobility support for analytics, BI and rules engine reporting and analysis.
• Piloting and then moving quickly to full launch of supplier portals and collaboration platforms, complete with quality management dashboards and workflows. Among the manufacturers visited, those in high tech are the most advanced in this area, often implementing Vendor Managed Inventory (VMI) and demand management applications that deliver real-time order status and forecasts.
• Designing in services is now becoming commonplace, making cloud integration expertise critical for manufacturers. From simplistic services integration on iPhones to the full implementation of voice-activated controls including emergency assistance in the latest luxury cars, adding in services integrated to the cloud is redefining the competitive landscape of industries today. Revising a product or launching a new product generation with embedded services can mitigate price wars, which is why many manufacturers are pursuing this strategy today.
• Accelerating new product development and introduction (NPDI) strategies to attain time-to-market objectives. Using cloud-based platforms in high tech manufacturing is growing today as time-to-market constraints are requiring greater collaboration earlier in design cycles.
• Managing indirect and direct channel sales from a single cloud platform tracking sales results against quota at the individual, group and divisional level is now commonplace across all manufacturers visited. Dashboards report back the status by each rep and for sales managers, the profitability of each deal.
• Using cloud-based marketing automation applications to plan, execute and most important, track results of every campaign. Marketing is under a microscope in many manufacturers today, as marketing automation applications have promised to deliver exceptional results and many manufacturers are still struggling to align their internal content, strategies and ability to execute with the potential these systems promise.
• Automating customer service, support and common order status inquiries online, integrating these systems to distributed order management, pricing, and content management platforms. Manufacturing industries are at varying levels of adoption when it comes to automating self-service. The cost and time advantages in high tech are the highest levels of adoption I’ve seen in visiting manufacturers however.
• Increasing reliance on two-tier ERP strategies to gain greater efficiencies in material planning, supplier management and reduce logistics costs. Manufacturers are also using this strategy to gain greater independence from a single ERP vendor dominating their entire operations. Several manufacturers remarked that their large, monolithic ERP systems could not, without intensive programming and customization, scale down to the smaller operational needs in distributed geographic regions.
• Reliance on cloud-based Human Resource Management (HRM) systems to unify all manufacturing locations globally. This often includes combining multisite talent management, recruiting, payroll and time tracking to optimize workforce allocations across their global manufacturing centers for example.

The bottom line for manufacturers? Using cloud-based systems to streamline key areas of their business, manufacturers are freeing up more time to invest in new products and selling more.

The bottom line for yours truly? I can now add manufacturing to my understanding of how cloud — in all its definitions, iterations, and inspirations —impacts us in ways we don’t always consider, or expect.

One of my all time favorite George Carlin comedic routines is entitled “Hello-Goodbye.”

The premise is simple and, like most Carlin content, makes you rethink the human condition. In this case, how we’re predisposed in coming up come with verbal variations on the same words, but ultimately how far short we fall in being able to ascribe any more weight or meaning to them when we do.

In this case and using his rapid-fire, free-rein, take no prisoners delivery on all the different ways to say hello (e.g., howdy, how it’s goin’, what’s goin’ on, whatdya think, and so on), as well as goodbye (e.g., bye, bye, so long, see ya later, hang loose, etc.), Carlin explains that his favorite goodbye line is, “Don’t get run over.” Which he immediately follows up with the observation, “Well, some people need practical advice.”

So, what does all this have to do with backup and recovery?

Well, I think we all remember Hurricane Sandy and the story (which I detailed in a previous post) about Knight Capital, a major brokerage that decided against switching its operations to a backup data center because it feared operational risks. Instead, in the midst of Sandy’s swath of destruction Knight decided to shut down all of its operations for the rest of the day in the middle of the trading session.

At the time Rachel Dines, a senior analyst at Forrester Research stated that “for all the money companies invest in infrastructure, management is often unable or unwilling to implement it when it’s needed most.”

Well, somewhere in the clouds (or more precisely in the regulatory oversight agency), the data backup and disaster recovery deities were listening. And ready to offer some advice.

In a recent announcement, NYSE Euronext, owner of the largest equities exchange, said exchanges (like theirs), should consider mandatory disaster recovery testing after Hurricane Sandy caused the longest weather shutdown since 1888.

Bloomberg reports that the exchange industry should weigh whether regular testing of connectivity and backup facilities should be mandatory, according to comments NYSE Euronext e-mailed today in response to questions from a U.S. Senate committee concerning computerized trading venues

Trading was halted for two days at the end of October when concerns about human safety and how well the New York Stock Exchange’s backup plan would work convinced executives that moving ahead was too risky. The Securities and Exchange Commission may consider whether exchanges’ emergency regimens need to be bolstered, a person familiar with the regulator’s thinking said in November.

“There are several lessons to be learned from this event”, NYSE Euronext said. “At a minimum, businesses learned the importance of a well-prepared and tested business continuity plan. At NYSE Euronext, we are actively considering changes to our current disaster recovery model.”

Now, if the New York Stock Exchange believes testing your business continuity and disaster recovery plans is in its best interests, what might be the implications of similarly testing the readiness of your organization?

After all, now and then some people (or even institutions like the NYSE), can benefit from good old fashioned practical advice that, I believe, might well extend to all businesses. Maybe even yours.

In technology, as in life, pursuing perfection is more often a journey than a destination. Witness the obligatory queue of “Patch Tuesdays” from Microsoft and, of course, dot iterations of software, almost all of it delivered ad hoc if not ad nauseum.

So, can the same be said of cloud?  Will we always be in search of “the perfect Cloud?”

A discussion of this subject matter can be found in this recent post by Lilac Schoenbeck. Writing in Cloud Computing Journal, Schoenbeck believes that the high expectations promised by cloud – to lower costs while delivering better service and greater efficiency – do not or should not come without risks for failure. Consider, for example, what would have happened if Orville and Wilbur Wright stopped their test flights after the first pass over Kitty Hawk or Thomas Edison throwing up his hands on producing the prototype of the incandescent light bulb?  Success is not only about persistence, it’s also about accepting the risk to achieve it.

So, if you’re evaluating the public, private or even hybrid cloud for your business, how do you as Schoenbeck asks, increase the odds for its success? As she proposes and as logic dictates, by building a foundation based on clear communication with the business about stakeholder requirements.  Make them specific, detailed and collaborative. And consider the following five steps to outline and coalesce a requirements-gathering process that favors your success. These include:

Step 1: Identify Your Users. To create exceptional cloud services, you need to understand who’s going to be using them. How technical are your users? How comfortable are they with self-service? How many users are there? How do they ask questions, provide feedback, or request support? Ask not only who will use the cloud now, but also who might be using it in two years. Identify the groups – and types of users – up front, so you can architect a cloud that can ultimately be rolled out to meet the broad needs of your organization.

Step 2: Identify the Services Your Users Want and Need. Ask your users for specific use cases that clearly demonstrate what they’re hoping to get from cloud services. This can be both a wish list (the wants) and a requirements doc (the needs). Once defined, these wants and needs become your value proposition: what you’re selling to the business. Make sure to ask developers and business users alike as both sets of stakeholders may have very different requirements and needs.

Step 3: Determine How Your Users Want the Cloud to Work. Ask your users what features they would like to see, what service levels they expect, and how the service(s) should look, feel, and act. Ask for examples, definitions, and numbers. How fast is fast? What other applications are “easy to use,” and why?

Step 4: Define Your Parameters. To provide the best possible service, you need to know your constraints. Number one, of course, is budget. What can you spend up front and on an ongoing basis? Where is the money coming from, and is it going to dry up? Other constraints include the following:

• Timeline. When do you need these services to go live? Is a phased approach an option, or do you need to go all out initially?
• Geography. Does your global company have cloud requirements in multiple countries, or can all cloud services be centralized?
• Legal requirements. Do data location laws govern the placement of your services, driving different geographical locations or compliance and security requirements?

Step 5: Define Success and How It Will Be Measured. Determine what a win means to the business so that you are targeting the same goals. What are their success metrics? They may be hard metrics, such as cost reduction and service level achievement, or soft metrics, such as user satisfaction and productivity. Either way, you need to know their thresholds and objectives in order to meet — and exceed — them.

To reiterate, while there’s no such thing as perfection – not when it comes to technology, to cloud or even human nature – by initiating and keeping an open mind and preserving open dialogue among key stakeholders, one that builds trust, understanding and shared knowledge you at least increase your odds. And that, my friends, is always (at least when it comes to cloud), a risk worth taking.

On the heels of the recent devastation in Moore, Oklahoma by a 2-mile wide E5 tornado comes word of NOAA’s predictions for an active or extremely active 2013 hurricane season.

According to its website, for the six-month hurricane season, which begins June 1, NOAA’s Atlantic Hurricane Season Outlook says there is a 70 percent likelihood of 13 to 20 named storms (winds of 39 mph or higher), of which 7 to 11 could become hurricanes (winds of 74 mph or higher), including 3 to 6 major hurricanes (Category 3, 4 or 5; winds of 111 mph or higher).

These ranges are well above the seasonal average of 12 named storms, 6 hurricanes and 3 major hurricanes.

“This year, oceanic and atmospheric conditions in the Atlantic basin are expected to produce more and stronger hurricanes,” said Gerry Bell, Ph.D., lead seasonal hurricane forecaster with NOAA’s Climate Prediction Center.

NOAA’s seasonal hurricane outlook is not a hurricane landfall forecast; it does not predict how many storms will hit land or where a storm will strike. Forecasts for individual storms and their impacts will be provided throughout the season by NOAA’s National Hurricane Center.

New for this hurricane season are improvements to forecast models, data gathering, and the National Hurricane Center communication procedure for post-tropical cyclones. In July, NOAA plans to bring online a new supercomputer that will run an upgraded Hurricane Weather Research and Forecasting (HWRF) model that provides significantly enhanced depiction of storm structure and improved storm intensity forecast guidance.

Also this year, Doppler radar data will be transmitted in real time from NOAA’s Hurricane Hunter aircraft. This will help forecasters better analyze rapidly evolving storm conditions, and these data could further improve the HWRF model forecasts by 10 to 15 percent.

“The start of hurricane season is a reminder that our families, businesses and communities need to be ready for the next big storm,” said Joe Nimmich, FEMA associate administrator for Response and Recovery. “Preparedness today can make a big difference down the line, so update your family emergency plan and make sure your emergency kit is stocked.”

Now, that said, if you’re a business, whether it’s a tornado, hurricane, floodwaters or something altogether unexpected, businesses should always have disaster recovery plans in place.

As described in this article from TheStreet, the Moore tornado is a prime example that U.S. weather patterns are becoming increasingly chaotic. Small business owners should be prepared for events they can’t control.

Natural disasters are here to stay and last week’s devastating tornado that ripped through Moore, Okla. killing two dozen people and injuring hundreds, is a prime example that U.S. weather patterns are becoming increasingly chaotic. Small business owners should be prepared for events they can’t control.

In fact, many parts of the New York and New Jersey coastal communities are still rebuilding from Superstorm Sandy, one of the worst hurricanes in U.S. history.

Significantly, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) estimates 40% of businesses do not reopen after a disaster, and of those that do reopen, 25% fail within one year.

A December 2012 survey by Alibaba, Vendio and Auctiva polled 600 small-business owners to gauge how prepared they were to run their business if a natural disaster struck. The findings were alarming: 74% of American small businesses do not have a disaster preparedness plan; 84% of them are without natural disaster insurance.

Bob Boyd, President and CEO of Agility Recovery, a former division of General Electric (GE) and a provider of business continuity and disaster recovery solutions to small and mid-sized businesses, spoke with TheStreet to offer small-business owners advice on preparing for uncontrollable events.

“I can’t stress enough how critical it is for an organization. Big companies they have to have these plans. Most small businesses don’t they don’t know what the options are, they don’t know how to get started. I think a lot of businesses think it’s going to be expensive or difficult or time consuming to put a plan together [that can be relevant for] something bad, like a tornado hitting. [A plan gives you] a strategy about what you’re going to do about it.”

And now a shameless (but altogether understandable, even valuable) plug.

When hurricanes Katrina and Rita hit in the summer of 2005 Venyu was prepared and so too were our clients. Our business continuity center was fully operational and helped save numerous businesses and organizations to say nothing of restoring a sense of normalcy in a post-Katrina New Orleans.

Within our commercial grade datacenter headquarters in Baton Rouge, LA Venyu developed a comprehensive business continuity center. The 93 fully-appointed workspaces include: high-speed internet, network connectivity, VoIP Phone, onsite technical support, onsite security and more (e.g., full kitchen and lounge, full bathroom and shower facilities, etc.)

Given the unpredictability of weather fronts and natural disasters, planning for the worst yet hoping for the best — especially in a projected active hurricane season — may be your best defense in preserving your business in the face of a Mother Nature’s increasing wrath and volatility.

So call us today and have peace of mind tomorrow, no matter what the forecast calls for.