What do Virtualization and Cloud executives think about 2012? Find out in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
2012 Predictions - Recovery as a Service (RaaS) Accelerates Public Cloud Adoption
Contributed
Article by Pedro Tortosa, co-founder and CTO, VirtualSharp Software
Public
clouds have gained credibility in 2011 and have become a choice to fulfill
computing needs at many companies. We have seen many of them deploy or migrate
mission critical workloads to public clouds, while big IT players improve their
offerings more and more. It is similar as when you see troops preparing for the
big battle after several minor skirmishes.
But
this evolution has happened in rather specific areas like email and SaaS. Cloud
computing still has to overcome some hurdles that could hamper mainstream
adoption during several years. Cloud is much more useful for new companies that
can design their business processes around the cloud from scratch, than for
older companies who have to redesign many things. Cloud is much more useful for
small companies that have their core business in Intel x86 platforms than for
bigger companies who have several platforms involved in every business process.
It easier to use cloud for companies who are not in heavily regulated sectors
than for companies that have to demonstrate compliance in security, continuity
and recovery.
One
of the factors than can drive and accelerate cloud adoption is the availability
of cloud services that are useful for a wide range of companies, and
undoubtedly efficient, non-intrusive, and enjoy a low risk of adoption.
Recovery as a Service, or RaaS, is one of these services that is helping to
change the vision that many companies have about cloud, because as with email
and SaaS, it can solve a real need for a growing number of companies with
efficiency and cost savings.
RaaS
is also one of the clearest use cases of the cloud because it enables resource
sharing across a large number of tenants, leading to deep economies of scale.
It can also contribute to accelerate cloud adoption because as companies become
used to having disaster recovery in the cloud and feel comfortable with it,
they will assimilate the idea of having also their production environment in
the cloud and experience the benefits that it provides.
One
of the main conditions for this to happen is the availability of products and
solutions in the market that can help to manage the replication of data as well
as fully configured applications to the cloud and assure their recoverability.
Cloud Service Providers (or CSPs) need to prove to their customers, and to
themselves, that they understand the entire service stack of their customers,
including hardware, storage, hypervisors, operating systems, middleware and
applications. Protecting data is not enough: CSPs must ensure that when their
customers need to failover to the public cloud, there will not be another
disaster lurking in the CSP's recovery infrastructure or procedures that can
cause applications to fail or perform inadequately, and lead to a public
relations nightmare, or worse still, contractual penalties from supply chain
partners or punitive action from regulatory authorities.
Accordingly,
customers and CSPs need to talk the same language and put metrics around
service resilience that mean the same across private and public clouds, so that
recovery time and recovery point objectives can be managed with a common set of
criteria aligned with the customers' business needs and meeting compliance
requirements. If this can be achieved, and we have every reason to believe that
it will be the case, RasS will become one of the hottest topics in 2012 and
public cloud adoption will skyrocket.
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