South African enterprises are readily moving to virtualisation and private cloud, but the public cloud is still viewed with suspicion. However, public cloud also has a lot to offer the enterprise, says Gregg Petersen of Veeam.
"While it's common knowledge that the public cloud offers OpEx advantages, agility, and faster deployment speeds, IT departments have concerns around security, legal compliance and a loss of control over the company's valuable data. In addition, C-level management and development groups often have different visions of how to use the public cloud."
As a result, on-premises or private cloud infrastructure is still the most-used solution for production environments, while the adoption of hybrid environments is increasing, with a combination of private cloud and certain front-end workloads moved to the public cloud. "Workloads like Web sites and new apps are popular candidates for a move to the cloud, but often the data itself stays on premises in your private cloud," says Petersen.
However, enterprises can make greater use of the public cloud across a number of areas, Petersen says. These include:
Test/development/acceptance environment
The public cloud can be used for testing solutions, development and acceptance. Organisations can create copies of the production environment in a public cloud and grant access to developers, test engineers, workload owners and more to that environment. After a project is finished, that environment can simply be shut down.
This approach allows developers, test engineers and quality control teams to work on production data without being on a production environment and means they can perform testing at scale. In addition, management likes the pay-as-you-go approach, and more importantly, they find that these scenarios allow the business to work faster and get to market faster with new and improved solutions.
Patching, updates and upgrades
Many enterprises have a change advisory board (CAB) that needs to approve all changes (bug fixes, security patches and functionality enhancements) that will happen in a production environment.
Best practice is to implement these as quickly as possible but only after they have been tested thoroughly to prevent any major issues making it to the live environment. The best way to do this is to mimic your production environment as well as possible when testing changes. Again, this is impossible for most companies due to a lack of resources.
By using copies of the production environment and restoring them into the public cloud, organisations can conduct effective testing and documenting of all those changes and feed that information into the change request plan. Potential back-out plans can also be tested, so the organisation can be prepared in case something wrong still goes into production.
After all the tests and documentation, the environment in the public cloud can be turned off (or even destroyed) to save on costs.
IT professionals will lose less time in setting up those environments, have better documentation of changes and perform better testing that matches the production environment. CAB decision-makers can be certain that the upgrades are tested more thoroughly and can sign off easier. And management is reassured that business will not be interrupted by the maintenance performed by different IT teams.
Disaster recovery testing
How frequently does your business test its backups or its disaster recovery plans? Weekly? Monthly? Quarterly? Yearly maybe? Or perhaps even never?
In many cases, leadership teams are not even aware of this and believe that these plans are readily available, updated and tested on a regular basis. The reasons why this doesn't happen are similar to the previous two scenarios: There aren't enough technical resources, people available to do it or time to do it in.
By using the latest copies of the production environment, organisations can restore the full production (or specific workloads) to the public cloud, make sure backups are quarantined from the production environment, and perform backup and recovery tasks and tests with speed.
With the public cloud, organisations do not need the resources on premises, and the process takes less time and effort. And even in a worst-case scenario, the production environment can be restored using the public cloud if there are no on-premises resources available.
"The public cloud is certainly something that needs to be considered by every business," says Petersen. "Which scenarios fit your business will depend on your specific environment, and your use cases can only be decided after careful evaluation. But many day-to-day supporting operations should be considered by nearly all businesses because they can help save time, money and resources. And even more importantly, the public cloud can help lower the risk of interrupting the production environment during maintenance operations, something which isn't acceptable anymore in an always-on world."
For more on how to build the architecture for using public cloud, download Veeam's whitepaper on the Veeam Cloud Connect v9 architecture here.
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