Venyu Blog

We’re all familiar with the “after” affect of buying a new car. You know, after you’ve left the showroom, drove it home and showed it off to your friends and acquaintances. When we’re asked about our purchase our first response isn’t always about its sticker price or how well we believed we “gamed” our car salesman. Instead, it’s that universal observation we all fall back on—our new roadster has “that new car smell.”  Not sure who came up with that trope or why it seems to stick in our collective conscious as THE benchmark for distinguishing whether a new car, apart from its value or pure grade functionality, met the aesthetic needs of its buyer, but I digress.

I bring this up because a recent post I discovered in ZDNet, comparing “the cloud” to airplanes—comparing recent high-profile “crashes” in the cloud to failover systems you hope the airlines have in place to provide a safe landing if failures occur—was followed up even more recently with a post in Sys-con.com entitled “Approach Cloud Like A New Car Purchase.” Needless to say, being a huge fan of analogies and metaphors, I couldn’t resist reading it and bringing it to your attention.

The author, Dave Elliot, handily dismisses the airplane analogy—You can’t select a cloud service provider the way you choose an airline, where getting the cheapest flight is the driving factor for most people Before purchasing their ticket, no one ever demands to see the safety record of the airline or the particular plane they’re entrusting to get them to their final destination.

Elliot then makes the distinction that when it comes to making your decision about the cloud sensible preparation will help you to take the right approach to cloud computing, to manage risks and fully realize the benefits that cloud offers: But, flip it around and look at the purchase process for an automobile. Before making your decision, you research the reliability and safety features of different models; you look up the safety rating; and you check out what others have said. Now that’s where cloud is more like a car – or at least it should be.

That research, he suggests, while stratified in the airline industry by government-bound organizations such as the FAA and NTSB, is still very much in flux as the Cloud Security Alliance, NIST, the SNIA and others are still working out both cloud security and availability standards for cloud computing. That leaves you, the cloud computing “buyer” in a virtual showroom with doing some of your own due diligence, “before cutting that check and driving off the lot with your new vehicle.”

So, what’s a buyer to do…? Elliot suggests following some or all of these guidelines to help direct you into making the right purchase:

Know yourself. Be clear on why you are going to the cloud. Improved mileage, better reliability, more room, or simply a sporty look during a midlife crisis – the reasons to buy a new car are wide ranging. You may be looking to be more agile in deploying apps, have an executive mandate, prefer OPEX to CAPEX, or simply be out of room in your data center. Don’t kid yourself and be crystal clear on your rationale and objectives for moving to the cloud.

Know your alternatives. Perhaps you can work at home, ride share or take the train. Perhaps a used car or leasing a car makes more sense than buying. Know the real costs of delivering services yourself instead of via a cloud service provider – including the costs of compute, storage, network, application and security. Not all services make business sense to move to the cloud all the time.

Downtime has consequences. In business, your critical systems are vital to your success; protecting them and making certain they’re always available is a big factor. Consider RTO (recovery time objective, or how long you can go without that app being available) and RPO (recovery point objective, or the amount of data you could afford to lose). The lower the RTO and RPO are, the more mission-critical that system is. Hosting less-important services in the cloud will reduce your costs while posing minimal risk of business interruption in the event of outage.

Look under the hood. You wouldn’t purchase a car without looking under the hood and researching its reliability and features. Don’t be afraid to ask cloud providers about the technology behind the service. Make sure you know where your data resides, and what your recovery and backup options are. You will rely on your SLA to resolve issues; make sure you negotiate a favorable agreement and make sure that it has real consequences for failure.

Take it for a test drive. If you’re looking at a public cloud solution, one of the key advantages of SaaS is that it makes it easy to deploy a free trial, and most vendors offer this to those considering their services. Start small with the trial, and once you’re satisfied you can expand the service to include confidential data and other mission-critical systems.

Have a maintenance plan. In case there is a failure, be ready. Simply because you drive a safe vehicle doesn’t mean you should cancel your roadside assistance. Stuff happens, be prepared with a plan to mitigate a failure. One of the best ways to maximize uptime is by testing your disaster recovery system in advance, to find any configuration problems that leave you vulnerable, just as you should inspect your car regularly to identify impending problems. Non-disruptive DR testing will allow you to identify issues your system has, without interrupting the availability of services for your clients and employees. Implementing a disaster recovery assessment tool is one of the best ways to ensure minimal loss of data and service.

Making the right purchase of a compact, mid-sized, full-sized or generously equipped SUV powered cloud not only ensures you keep “that new car smell” longer, but also keeps your enterprise fully tuned so as a business you can get to where you’re going both safely and reliably.

And of course, if you need any help in selecting a model from that great virtual cloud computing showroom just ask Venyu. You don’t even have to call ahead for an appointment.