As our clients migrate applications and services to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) platforms, they are facing some fundamental questions related to ensuring that their applications and data are both available and protected. The West Monroe Cloud Operations Reliability Engineering (CORE) practice has assembled a number of methodologies and best practices regarding the selection, implementation, and operation of IaaS-based infrastructure solutions.
Due to the "cloudy" nature of IaaS solutions, the true capabilities of the built-in high availability and data protection features can be difficult for inexperienced system administrators to design and implement effectively.
The following include a sample of West Monroe best practices to select, design, and operate hosted infrastructure solutions: IaaS provider selection tips:
IaaS-based system design tips:
IaaS-based system operation tips:
Depending on the size of the environment to be hosted and its importance to your business, not all of the above recommendations may apply. Understand your business and operational requirements prior to designing and implementing an IaaS solution, and incorporate the proper CORE technologies and processes into the solution.
What have your experiences been with designing a reliable IaaS solution? Are you finding that IaaS vendors are responsive to your functional and operational requirements for reliability and data safety?
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