Five Nines Availability in-House or in-the-Cloud?

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By Malcolm Orekoya, Network & Security Specialist, Netutils

Views expressed in this post are original thoughts posted by Malcolm Orekoya, Network & Security Specialist, Netutils. These views are his own

For decades the availability of networks to their intended users has always been a priority. Data centres, from small to large, from enterprise to service provider networks, have always been built so that their infrastructure; routers, firewalls, switches and everything else in between, had layers of redundancy, resiliency and high availability.

As more and more applications get developed and more services move to a hosted or cloud infrastructure, we’ve seen over the years various guarantees of service availability. First it was 99.9% availability, then 99.99% and now we regularly hear of the five nines; 99.999% high availability, guaranteeing downtime of less than 5.26 minutes a year (if we keep going in that direction, nine nines availability has a ring to it I think).

So why all the nines, what does it all mean to your business, how can your business guarantee such high availability, how does this all connect to the cloud trend and what is the impact on your users? Well to your business, it obviously means you get less downtime in a year and as a result your critical services and applications are available more than they’re not, which hopefully means users productivity is maintained or increased.

One of the key considerations for enterprises today is whether to keep managing their infrastructure, services and applications in house (that is within their own managed data centres) or whether to move some or all of it to the cloud (that is a hosting provider) in an effort to keep up with the nines. There are arguments to support all options, but the trend is very much moving towards offloading parts or all of certain business critical infrastructure, software and services to third party cloud hosting providers and a couple of the reasons for this are:

Costs – Reducing IT costs (OPEX and/or CAPEX) is always top of the agenda for businesses and being able to do this while maintaining the level of availability of services and applications is paramount. With technology continually changing and the amount of applications continually multiplying, it is an increasingly difficult and costly task to keep the network infrastructure that underpins business activity highly available. Costs of hardware, software, maintenance, support and staff to manage the infrastructure (training costs included) all add up and usually these costs reoccur at the end of products or systems lifecycles, which is typically between three to five years.

By moving applications, services and infrastructure to the cloud, enterprises can take advantage of the robust infrastructure that these providers have in place, to provide multiple layers of resiliency, redundancy as well as compliance without having to incur the high costs associated with achieving this themselves. In many cases enterprises are able to reduce capital expenditure (CAPEX) for projects and introduce more predictable operating expenses (OPEX).

Finally, at least enterprises know that their availability SLA with cloud providers means they have someone else to point their finger at and in some cases get compensation should they experience any downtime. Although I would not base any decisions on which solutions to deploy based solely on this.

Flexibility to change – A lot of enterprises build in a degree of scalability into their systems from the beginning to allow for growth. But as technology, software and user behaviour changes so rapidly nowadays, enterprises can frequently find themselves inflexible to change or upgrades that could be beneficial to their business and can often find that the degree of scalability they had accounted for might not be enough. In addition things like product and system life cycles, which as I mentioned earlier is typically between three to five years, after which time the platform is considered out of date in comparison to the latest trends, can result in enterprises being forced to either spend a lot to get their platforms up to date or having to lag behind for a while.

In a cloud environment the speed at which new technology, systems, software and application updates can be made available to users is much quicker and one of the reasons for this is that many providers have a direct relationship or partnership with vendors that allows them to use and test various platforms well in advance of general release, thereby allowing them to leverage this vendor relationship by being able to quickly pass on new products, technology and services to their customers, while still maintaining the 99.999% availability of the system to the end users. The cost to the enterprise is normally a minimal increase in OPEX as opposed to large costs that can be incurred with rolling out platform updates or upgrades. In addition the flexibility offered by the cloud providers, means enterprises can scale up the resources that they utilise much quicker and easier than they typically can with an in house system. For example a cloud storage-as-a-service offering can in many cases allow enterprises to double the amount of storage being used by simply submitting a support ticket request to the cloud provider as a predefined cost.

To summarise, taking into consideration the ways in which we now work, with mobile users, increased collaboration, cloud applications and the as-a-service boom; in today’s enterprises the end user is king (arguably so) and business productivity can almost directly be linked to the availability of the enterprise resources that are used on a daily basis by users. Therefore the number of nines present in the availability percentage of enterprise systems will most definitely remain very important and the more nines there are then the less downtime the system is technically going to experience. But the balance of who can provide the most reliable availability figures (in house or in the cloud) will always be tipped by various enterprise specific factors that have to be weighed individually, there is no one size fits all.

BYOD: Understanding and Planning Equals Success

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By Malcolm Orekoya, Network & Security Specialist, Netutils

Views expressed in this post are original thoughts posted by Malcolm Orekoya, Network & Security Specialist, Netutils. These views are his own

We are now all too aware of the proliferation of mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets in enterprises today and employers supporting a bring-your-own-device (BYOD) environment in order to support the growing number of employees who want to use their devices to work at home, at the office and while on the move is definitely on the rise. But what is the right approach to a successful BYOD implementation? Why at such an early stage of the BYOD popularity are so many enterprises struggling to correctly implement a BYOD environment?

Similar to starting up a new business, there has to be a good understanding of what one is trying to achieve (like having a business plan complete with forecasts and your bottom line), a good knowledge of all the variables involved (like knowing your market and competitors) and there needs to be a solid foundation from which to start (like having financial support through savings, investors or your bank). Today a lot of enterprise BYOD implementations start with the end user (usually a few high level executives) wanting to use their personally owned devices to access corporate resources while in the office and out of the office. As a result, IT departments begin their BYOD planning by starting with a small group of users, then their devices, then the resources they want to access, followed by how to implement control and then finally, a BYOD policy is formulated and rolled out to the larger employee population. In my opinion this is the wrong approach and sets the enterprise up for running into numerous problems down the line.

Irrespective of how the BYOD conversation starts within any enterprise, once the decision has been made to adopt BYOD across the network (i.e. it has gained the organisations support), a rethink needs to take place which properly considers the users, devices, resources, control and enterprise wide BYOD policy that would apply to everyone. The sequence of considering these variables when planning a BYOD environment should look something like shown below and not the other way around.

BYOD Policy → Resources →Control → Devices → Users

Each one of these considerations affects and ties in with the next one. The BYOD policy should stipulate that which  the enterprise requires its employees to agree (this policy should be signed by employees) and this will be influenced by the type of resource access required by the employees as well as the control utilised. For example, if an employee wants to bring in their own device to gain full access to corporate resources (say similar to what he or she has on their desktop computer,) the BYOD policy might state that the employee is required to allow IT to install a piece of software on their device that will allow IT to control and validate the posture of the users device (for instance check the Anti-Virus is up to date and possibly wipe the device if it’s lost or stolen.) If, however, the employee would rather not give this level of control over his or her device to IT, then they may only be granted limited access to corporate resources (for instance use of the internet and maybe web email.) Furthermore, the control required by the enterprise would determine the devices that it supports, which in turn could determine what devices users end up purchasing, although the popularity of some devices, such as Apple and Android devices, could quite possibly dictate both.

Enterprises need to start thinking about their BYOD implementation planning before actually implementing BYOD across their network. Considering the variables in the right order avoids putting the cart before the horse and would help avoid problems in the future. Having said that, it is worth mentioning that although planning for BYOD should start from the left to right of the variables mentioned  earlier, actually implementing BYOD should be considered from right to left; I’ll explain. Implementing BYOD starts by considering the level of trust attributed to a user and/or device, which is usually determined by users and/or devices successfully authenticating or validating their identity to a trusted entity, followed by the authorisation (access control) subsequently given to corporate resources, where the level of trust determines the level of access granted. All of which must ultimately comply with the organisation’s BYOD policy.

User Trust→Device Trust → Access Control/Authorisation →Resources→BYOD Policy

Again, each variable ties in with the other variables next to it, but it is important that enterprises do not make the mistake of starting to write their BYOD policy by first considering the trust attributed to their users.

In conclusion, as I mentioned at the beginning, starting a business almost always involves an understanding of the market, competitors and a business plan before anything begins. The same should be the case with BYOD in the context of the variables mentioned above, only then will your enterprise minimise problems and increase its probability of a successful and worthwhile BYOD environment.

 

Web Demo: Cloudutils App Performance

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In this short webinar our Marketing Manager Vanessa Cardwell in joined by Rogier VANDERWAL, VP Cloud Services, Ipanema to deliver an overview and demo of our Cloudutils App Performance Solution. Cloudutils App Performance allows enterprises to take full advantage of cloud and internet based applications guaranteeing application visibility as a service. A simple, flexible cloud managed service from Netutils helping you improve user productivity, reduce user complaints and get the most from your cloud apps.

Webinar Recording: Guarantee Application Performance

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Are you moving or planning to move business applications to the cloud? If so, you may share some of the following concerns:
• The time & costs involved in resolving application performance problems
• Having the information visibility you need in order to make QoS decisions
• Ensuring business critical applications take preference over resource hungry social and non- critical applications
If your role includes responsibility for cloud application performance and delivery and you identify with one or more of these issues then watch our webinar here.

iPad mini winner announced!

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Meet Janusz Naks, Information Security Manager and winner of our iPad mini prize draw at JanuszIPadmini3BLOGCloud Expo Europe. Janusz was a visitor to our stand at the event in January 2013 where we launched Cloudutils, our range of cloud services.

‘I’m thrilled to have won the iPad mini, it came as an unexpected but very welcome surprise! In the higher education sector we are looking at BYOD as part of on-going strategy. In HE students, staff & visiting lecturers are already using tablets, laptops, and smart phones, as are some of the IT team, so winning the iPad mini will support our BYOD initiatives and will be instrumental in defining policies aimed at securing the BYOD environment. I am sure that the iPad will become an essential working tool for me day to day. Thanks Netutils!’

 We will be keeping in touch with Janusz to find out how he’s getting on. In the meantime many congratulations from all the team here at Netutils. (And no… we’re not jealous .. well, maybe a little bit.)

Webinar Recording: Cloudutils RADIUS-as-a-Service

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A high performance AAA RADIUS solution is the cornerstone of any access control system. Rather than continue with the burden and ongoing overheads of hosting your RADIUS servers yourself, why not consider RADIUS-as-a-Service in the cloud?

Our Cloudutils RADIUS-as-a-Service AAA cloud solution removes the management burden of server implementation but keeps you firmly in control, allowing you to manage your authentication service around your users and your business needs for just a few pence, per user, per day. No capital outlay, no on-site hardware, no upgrade or maintenance costs, just one simple annual subscription plan.

Watch the webinar to discover how Cloudutils RADIUS-as-a-Service can help you.

WEBINAR Recording: Guest Access, Made Easy

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The rise of user expectations for anytime, anywhere wireless access places increasing pressures on the IT team. To meet this demand today’s organisations are required to offer guest Wi-Fi services throughout the communal areas of their head and branch offices for visitors, contractors and staff.  If your role includes responsibility for secure guest access then please take a look at our recent popular webinar which introduces our Cloudutils Guest Access solution.