FINAL WORD
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
board (CAB) that needs to approve all
changes (bug fixes, security patches and
functionality enhancements) that will
happen in a production environment.
The 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.
Enter the public cloud again. 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. What’s even
better is that 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
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INTELLIGENTCIO
Can we use the public cloud again for
this scenario? The answer is obviously
yes, and the way to do this is again very
similar to the previous scenarios. 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.
And the cloud brings even more
advantages. You don’t need to have the
resources on premises, the process takes
less time and effort and it’s easier to
perform. You gain peace of mind with
the knowledge that, even in a worst-case
scenario, you can restore your production
environment using the public cloud if there
are no on-premises resources available.
Conclusion
The public cloud is certainly something
that needs to be considered by every
business. 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
such as the scenarios above can and 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.
www.intelligentcio.com
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