How Reliable Is Cloud Computing?

Cloud computing is the new system that had promised so many things in the structure and conduct of business to online organizations and businesses. These new, improved processes include better flexibility, reduced costs, greater performance, advanced security, managerial ease, and reduced infrastructure investments among others.

Reliability, however, is the topmost concern among IT managers when referring to this new model set by cloud computing systems. (Typically, 3.65 days of downtime in a year is average for non-redundant hardware, including the reload time of the operating system and backup restorations.)

Downtimes

For the organization, downtimes are generally regarded as planned or unplanned. Cloud computing has some benefits for planned downtimes. However, it can produce the biggest effect on businesses in reducing unplanned downtimes.

Planned downtimes are usually out of the area of vendors of cloud computing unless they offer IT operation services as well. These planned downtimes are usually software maintenance, upgrades, or scheduled equipment repairs.

Unplanned downtimes

In cloud computing, planned downtimes are kept to a minimum because that is part of what they are selling (providing high uptime). Unplanned downtimes are where the cloud vendors can offer the most, or where they can lose the most.

They have the experience and proven processes that can produce overall network (and hardware) reliability that can exceed those of average data centers, or colocated or solo servers.

Service level agreements (SLA)

Despite the claims of reliability, only a few cloud vendors have fixed SLAs that can assure controlled downtime or present reimbursements for extra downtime. Vendors with appropriate software with self-healing properties offers better guarantees in their SLA with their clients.

Some big organizations do not normally guarantee this level of services. Those cloud vendors with self-healing software (or some similar technologies) can still suffer unplanned downtime for many reasons, foremost of which is human error.

Backups

To ensure an airtight reliability, a good backup strategy is very important. However, in cloud systems equipped with the latest highly reliable software technologies, managers tend to forego such necessary backups.

Without backups, systems that are down will be down for a long time, and this applies to cloud or non-cloud systems. Data loss is also a very probable prospect. The only saving grace that cloud computing systems have over the others is the inexpensive and large storage facility to store the backups.

Costs

For some, another security measure used is backing up their data from one cloud vendor to another. However, many of today's backup software are designed for physical servers and not the virtual environments in a cloud computing company.

The end result is that these solutions might entail high costs. Many of today's backup applications usually charges on a per server basis.

Vigilance

Another reliability factor that usually escapes most users, especially those new to the world of cloud computing, is monitoring. Unplanned downtimes can be disastrous to your system and to your data.

A remote monitoring system can scan you servers on a regular basis for faults, impending application problems, or even present performance levels. These can alert you of impending downtime or problems that can cause downtimes.

Good reliability in a system, whether in cloud computing or otherwise, still needs good old traditional approaches in solving problems.

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