Intelligent CIO Middle East Issue 10 | Page 86

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 86 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 C M Y CM MY CY CMY K