Why all these planning services?
We are sometimes asked why we spend all of this time and effort doing strategy and planning services. In late April, 2011, Amazon sustained a serious service interruption with its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) service, lasting nearly two days. Not all of Amazon’s subscribers were adversely affected. For those who were, however, it was a time of frustration and helplessness. This has generated some entirely predictable responses tolling the “death of the Cloud”, or at least the prospect of a pervasive slowdown in enterprise adoption of Public Cloud services. In our view, however, this event has simply underscored certain factors which, from the outset, have been critical to Cloud adoption in general and Public Cloud adoption in particular.
As with any other part of a key operation – computers, building power, call center facilities, etc. – it’s incumbent upon the enterprise to develop a clear understanding of how much unplanned down time is acceptable to the business, and create a clear and actionable plan for dealing effectively with the inevitable service interruption, within acceptable cost parameters. This is not new to IT; the Public Cloud just adds another “utility” to be handled. In some cases, a premium service or a special arrangement with the service provider may be appropriate. This appears to have been the case for those who subscribed to Amazon’s FailSafe options, who were not severely affected by this event.
It really is just like other forms of insurance. Sometimes you can do without it – if loss of the underlying asset will not cause too much hardship. Typically, Test and Development in the Cloud might fall into this category. Informational or promotional sites also might, but this should be a subject for further analysis.
An important outcome of our strategy and planning phases is that you will get a good understanding of the business importance of a workload you are thinking of moving to the Cloud.