Eric Pitcher, CA Technologies
InfoExecutive gave readers the lowdown on the public versus private cloud earlier this week – but what should organizations do once they’ve made the leap? Andi Mann, vice president of virtualization product marketing at CA Technologies, has some tried and true tips on how to make cloud implementations successful in the event of disaster recovery.
If nothing else, in order to get the most from the cloud, virtualize, according to Mann. “Part of the benefit of virtualization is that it makes a server workload highly mobile,” he said. “It can move around. And if you’ve got hardware dependency like your mission critical applications, your order entry, your customer service applications and they’re dependent on a specific box in your data centre, then you have a real problem when it comes to moving that workload.”
Tip number two is to plan and test your systems continuously. “Businesses don’t stand still,” Mann stressed. “They’re always changing their model, they’re adding new applications and services, they’re removing old applications and services that don’t work.”
Don’t just mull over the idea of a backup plan, implement one immediately. “It’s not enough to have a backup plan that you decide in January when the disaster happens in the following December,” Mann said. “You’ve got to make sure the plan is in place and you’ve got to test regularly.”
Even the best disaster recovery plan will fail the organization if it isn’t continuously monitored. “Maybe that’s month-to-month or even better, week-to-week,” Mann said. “You don’t necessarily need to test it all at once but you need to make sure that the whole plan will work together.”
