You have dabbled in the cloud and found success. Are you thinking about those mission-critical applications – are they ready for the cloud? Also important, is your cloud computing provider ready for mission-critical applications writes Thor Olavsrud from CIO?
Mr. Olavsrud outlines five “signs” that your cloud provider is NOT ready for taking on your mission-critical application in the cloud.
- What is your cloud provider’s typical pitch? Does it focus more on billing and provisioning rather than reliability? This could be a sign that your cloud provider focuses more on developer services and not on hosting Tier 1 applications.
- Change mangement? The service provider should have a mature and documented change management process.
- Runbooks? You will find that the vast majority of cloud providers today focus mainly on non-mission-critical workloads, so they may not have a clear understanding or experience with runbooks. Ask for examples of the runbooks they use today.
- SLA? Does your provider offer a SLA at the application level or for each product it provides? Experts recommend that the SLA is at the application layer.
- App tools? The cloud provider should have tools that allow for patch management and application performance monitoring so that you can continue to monitor performance metrics.
