Page 103 - Cloud Essentials

Having a contingency plan is nothing new to IT. IT departments have

always had to deal with technology vendors changing direction, as well as
with disaster recovery and business continuity planning.

Risk Management
The major risk with external service providers and technology providers is
the dependency on them. If the service, hardware, or software is no longer

available, this can be damaging to the organization. Proper risk management
mandates that the risk is managed or accepted. It is not always necessary to
have a completely identical alternative standby; the important thing is that
the cost or damage of the risk is acceptable.

Data in Storage at a Service Provider Businesses cannot run without
reliable access to related data. Storing data in the cloud makes it centrally

available, but network access to your cloud provider, or the cloud provider
going out of business, would render that data inaccessible. The data might
consist of the following:

The data could be your customer database in a CRM application.
The data could be all the virtual machines you have configured at your
IaaS.

The data could be accumulated by the application. Think of an
employee knowledge management system with a lot of contributed
articles. It could be hard or costly to re-create that data.

Virtual Machines A server with an operating system represents value. A
server with an operating system and a lot of specifically configured and
finely tuned software can represent a lot more value. This is even true if the
software is free, open software. In a virtualized environment, this server is
nothing more than a large data file. Nevertheless, if these configurations are
tailored to a specific provider or virtualization technology, reengineering
them for a different platform may be costly.

Software Packages SaaS providers typically run their own software,

rather than licensing it from a software vendor. This makes the potential for
software lock-in big. Because SaaS providers typically charge on a pay-
per-use basis, there is little software license investment lost when such a
provider suspends its service.
However, the data that is stored in the application may not be easily

converted to a similar application. In addition, all staff working with the

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