As traditional on-premise computing and data storage moves to the cloud, many companies have questions about data outages. What happens when the cloud experiences an outage?
It is unlikely that an entire cloud data center will go down, but it is not impossible, as Amazon’s recent outage in Dublin showed. Fortunately, companies can look to managed multisite availability to provide a higher level of service to keep the customer environment up and running, even in the event of an entire site disaster.
The phrase “managed multi-site availability” essentially defined itself. “Managed” refers to the ability of your vendor to help re-create your information technology in the event of a natural disaster or man-made incident. A Do-It-Yourself (DIY) service provider offers infrastructure only, while a cloud provider offering managed services has all the capabilities and processes you expect with IT, like change management, security, operations control, and the ability to resolve problems and issues.
Multi-site means your vendor has multiple sites where the cloud is available. That means you have options and different price points for satisfying back-up and recovery requirements in line with your business requirements, from high availability to highly resilient, failover and recovery, with many nuances in-between.
In effect, multi-site capabilities means the vendor has a “continuum of availability” at your disposal. “Availability” refers to the how accessible an application must be. The more important an application is to your business, the higher the availability it requires.
The availability requirements for production applications are much higher than the availability requirements for a development or testing environment. To accommodate production applications, the cloud environment is built from the ground up for production-level availability. It is not enough to add change management, security, operations control, etc. on top of a DIY environment.
How many applications in your data center require high availability?
Learn more about SunGard’s Enterprise Cloud Services.
