Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
renewed when consumed. More complex hosting costs include per-
transaction micro fees, upload/download transaction costs, incre-
mental storage costs, and specialized costs for restrictions of data
and DR backups to specific geopolitical boundaries.
• Privacy requirements
—Contracting cloud services should include
statements of where data will be stored, where DR copies may be
made, and conditions for reporting when data is exposed or trans-
ferred to new hosting facilities. Because larger hosting firms may
make use of environmental cooling by moving data center opera-
tions north during summer months, requirements for legal data
discovery and open records requests may fall under different legal
systems. Contracts should include details regarding reporting dis-
covery actions and other forms of external data access.
• Compatibility
— to best use available application development skills
and tools, cloud computing platform standards should be selected to
integrate well with existing enterprise technologies. Mid-migration
between local and cloud-hosted e-mail services, for example, is much
less problematic if both services are compatible and can interoperate
transparently. Because cloud services trade off flexibility and cus-
tomizability for protection against potential conflict with shared
resource clients, some applications may prove to be unable to migrate
into the cloud and so a standard for interoperability between cloud
and local applications is mandatory.
Summary
This chapter has addressed the virtualization of services, applications,
workstations, servers, networks, and migration of entire infrastructures
into the cloud. Virtualization practices provide significant cost savings
by reducing hardware, energy, and cooling costs. Virtualization provides
reductions in support requirements, as well as ease of recovery following
system loss or upgrade.
The steady migration of resources into the cloud reduces tech support
requirements for new initiatives, and eases resource extension to meet
growing or widely varying requirements. Care must be taken to ensure
that virtualized resources are managed, updated, and retired just like their
physical system counterparts. The next chapter will examine tech refresh
cycles and strategies in greater detail.
