Skip navigation
TELUS Talks Business
Community > Talking Business > Tags > shawn_myron

Talking Business

5 Posts tagged with the shawn_myron tag
Shawn.Myron
0

Not all cloud services and the providers who deliver them are equal. In the conclusion of our series Send in the Cloud: A limited series to help you develop a Cloud storage strategy, we thought it useful to present some final guidance when considering suitable cloud storage providers.

 

We’ll walk through four areas to look out for:

 

  • The Cloud Storage Provider
  • The Cloud Storage Service
  • Your Data – Portability, Security
  • Implementation and Support

 

Cloud Storage Provider

 

  • The Organization

As with any decision involving the sourcing of a business service, it is important to determine whether the organization delivering it has the expertise and track record to demonstrate seriousness in the particular domain. Usually, a solid provider includes a long reputation of delivering similar or identical services.

  • Trust

Consider a service provider with whom you feel you can entrust some of your most valuable assets, your data backup, intellectual property or the content that fuels your business. Just like you would treat holding your organization's cash with an established financial institution, consider a cloud service provider that is in good financial standing, engages in ethical business practices and presents fair and equitable terms and conditions for the service.

  • Legacy of data centre expertise

Not only is the history of delivering IT services an indicator of trustworthiness, but also one of technical and organizational competency. Hiring, training, and managing experienced data centre professionals provides distinct skills and capabilities that are the foundation of a trust and stable cloud service.

 

The Cloud Storage Service

 

  • Quality Commitment

The quality of the provided service should include a commitment for service quality. Enterprise class services entail a well-defined service-level agreement (SLA) with specified provisions should service quality not be met. Note that some services providers describe service objectives that the provider has no vested in reaching, in particular with value-oriented or free services.

  • Flexibility

As with service providers, client organizations are not created equal. Good service providers will be able to adapt their services and work with you to address your specific needs. Modular services allow for more flexibility whereas integrated solutions can provide advanced capabilities. It is also helpful to consider whether the provided service offers room for future growth that aligns with your organization’s changing business requirements.

  • Technical Capabilities

Some services are more capable than others, with some offering far more access and connection options, different back-up solutions, compatibility with existing IT systems and services or powerful management tools. It is up to you to decide whether these are essential for your organization or “nice to have”s.

  • Subscription Commitment

Commitment from you, as the client, is a key deciding factor as well. Certain services providers offer service in a flexible manner, whereas some require term contracts. The level of incremental service or tier can also be large or small. Being able to try the service before committing is invaluable in choosing the appropriate provider for you.

  • Fees

Obtain a clear breakdown of what is included in the service and find out the cost of any optional add-on services. Be well-informed of all overage charges, surcharges, or hidden fees. In the case of cloud storage specifically consider things such as bandwidth charges and the cost of performing bulk migration of data either to or from the service.

 

Data, data portability, data security

 

  • Data Protection

Your data needs to be protected with the most modern IT and physical security practices from malicious activities and natural disasters. Fully-secured data centres with built-in redundancies are expensive investments that not all organizations are capable of making. Some cloud services offer multiple tiers of protection which you may find suitable for your needs even for additional fees.

  • Data Security

Ensuring data security in a multi-tenant cloud is a key consideration and a known barrier to cloud adoption. A cloud storage service that obscures user account information from the stored data helps eliminates unlawful access to by both outsiders and the service provider’s staff. Some service providers perform background checks on all employees to prevent such occurrences.

  • Jurisdiction

As your business data resides in your service provider’s facilities, consider the physical location of the infrastructure and the ensuing jurisdiction issues. An end-to-end Canadian service provider (incorporation, data centre facilities and network connections) is not subject to the US Patriot Act, which allows the US government access to data stored with the service.

  • Data Portability

As a client, provider lock-in is both irritable and expensive. To minimize this concern, consider a service that uses industry-standard software and protocols that allows your data to be transferred at your convenience, and will not retain your data beyond your service commitment. Don’t forget to check for the existence and cost of optional services to perform bulk migration to the cloud storage service or from it when you choose to.

 

Implementation and Support

 

  • Assistance

What levels of assistance and support will you receive when you subscribe to the service and on an ongoing manner, even round the clock support. Phone, e-mail, online (self-support) mechanisms and the languages in which these are provided vary between providers. Some providers will also provide integration or development support for cloud storage services that are accessible for application development.

  • Ease of use

The level of complexity of the service can determine whether your organization is receiving the solution’s full value.  Those that are simple to integrate with your existing IT environment and easy to implement will reduce your operating costs and will also lower switching costs significantly. You will be delivering value to your organization much quicker as well.

 

I hope you found this blog series on Cloud Storage valuable and welcome your questions or comments.

 

Shawn Myron is the director of products and services for TELUS' hosting and data centres.

1,127 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: 10-99, 100+, business, leadership, cloud_computing, it_security, enterprise, 109, shawn_myron, data_storage, cloud_storage, send_in_the_cloud, data_security
Shawn.Myron
0

As we've discussed in Send in the Cloud: A limited series to help you develop a cloud storage strategy, the Cloud - and by extension Cloud Storage - offers numerous benefits. But they don’t come without risks.

 

Whether it’s long term archiving, online backup, live web content or other content delivery, whatever the use-case for cloud storage in your business, the potential should be weighed against the possible downsides. I know it sounds corny (and probably dates me) but to paraphrase the Joni Mitchell song, if you take a balanced look at both sides of the cloud the net result will help you determine if Cloud Storage yields a possible and better alternative to the status quo or your company’s traditional course of action.

 

In our final instalment in this series next week I’ll offer an extensive checklist of considerations for you to use when looking for a Cloud Storage service. For now, let's consider a selection of the high level promises and pitfalls of Cloud.

 

Financial and operating flexibility VS total cost of ownership (TCO)

 

Whether the cost savings that cloud technology and service providers alike claim are attainable is too complex to calculate and grasp. Whatever the promise of TCO, it is certain that renting infrastructure capacity through the Cloud via a pay-per-use model eliminates the need for upfront capital investments and provides the financial and operating flexibility many organizations seek. The challenge (and associated risk) is that increased consumption of cloud capacity may reach a point where the overall cost and complexity to manage the cloud reaches a state where the financial case is harder to make.

 

Rapid scalability VS control

 

Cloud storage provides unlimited and available capacity for an organization to consume as it needs to grow. If such growth is pursued in an uncontrollable fashion, both storage volumes and costs may surpass the original intentions and budget of the initiative this service was originally designed for. While cloud storage may be the most suitable and cost effective storage alternative you have for the particular application, it is not free. An extreme use of a cheap service will have an impact on your bottom line; therefore planning and controls are required.

 

Accessibility VS Security, Privacy and Compliance

 

Cloud storage is predominantly an Internet-accessible and device-independent service that delivers unsurpassed accessibility to the applications (or devices) that store or consume the data.

 

Depending on the infrastructure supporting the cloud service, and the mechanisms to support protection of the data both in transport and at rest (e.g. encryption or obfuscation), it may be exposed to unlawful access.

 

Depending on the location of the cloud storage service or the provider's jurisdiction of incorporation, your data may be subject to regulations that are not in line with your responsibilities to your stakeholders, including employees, customers and the Canadian law (mostly privacy law).

 

Flexibility VS Freedom

 

I would argue that one of the most promising traits of Cloud is flexibility. The flexibility to consume as much service as needed and easily upload data to a storage cloud service is what makes it so appealing.

 

Users should, however, realize that in some cases the systems supporting the service are mostly designed with one thing in mind: to to get you in, not to get you out. Data objects that are added to the cloud service either on a gradual basis or through one time bulk migrations does not mean they are easily extracted and migrated off the cloud service when you expect to exercise your data freedom. Lock-in should be a real risk worth considering.

I hope this gave you a taste of both perspectives and that you'll come back to read the complete list of Cloud Storage considerations.

 

Shawn Myron is the director of products and services for TELUS hosting and data centres.

 

Questions about the cloud and whether it's right for your company? Ask them here via comment.

851 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: 10-99, 1-9, business, cloud, telus, enterprise, shawn_myron, integrated_network_management, cloud_storage, 100, send_in_the_cloud
Shawn.Myron
0

In 5 Things to consider when you’re considering the Cloud for data back-up and archiving, I discussed using cloud storage services for backup and long term data retention (or archiving) purposes. Today let's examine how cloud storage can be an effective platform for sharing, storing and distributing useful content.

 

Content Sharing and Distribution

 

Long before people started trusting the cloud as their backup ‘repository,’ the Internet, through a range of capabilities, was being used to store and share information in various forms between users and between organizations.

 

One of the first applications of cloud storage is the ability to store and share content between users, especially if the files being shared are serving multiple users or cannot be effectively delivered through means such as FTP or e-mail. A couple of weeks ago we mentioned DropBox, a service that has gained popularity mostly among consumers likely largely due to a free space limited service tier and a mobile access option. The web is littered with a multitude of “file sharing” services, many of which are commonly used for underground peer-to-peer activity. This broad category of solutions also spans subscription based services such as YouSendIt that are more effectively designed to bypass e-mail limitations.

 

The common themes for many of those services are the low (or even free) pricing options designed to convince users about the benefits of the services. There is even an experimental Windows add-on called GMail Drive that allows you to use a Gmail account as a virtual disk drive. Not all alternatives offering extensive security options or guaranteed reliability; your mileage will vary greatly.

 

For organizations that seek secure and reliable content sharing and distribution, commercial grade cloud storage services and technologies can include other capabilities such as strong authentication, secure transfer, tracking options and functionality to integrate the storage as an extension to another application or web site.

 

A historic perspective on web content

 

As you can imagine (and see from this graph supported by UN data), the Internet has gone through tremendous, quasi exponential, growth since 1990. But the world wide web (does anyone still refer to it that way?) grew wider not only in its geographical span and complexity but also in the huge variety of applications and content it supports.

 

The files comprising this consumable content were originally limited to rather static web pages, images and a constrained variety of files that would be ‘understood’ by web browsers such as Netscape (RIP) and early versions of Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Since the early nineties the types of content we can access evolved greatly to support a myriad of unstructured content (i.e. documents) and multimedia types.

 

Another dramatic contrast is the change in content complexity and sizes we consumed then and now. Not too long ago, relatively speaking, early web users visited pages containing a few images, links to documents and the odd background midi sound file totaling up to several tens of kilo-bytes in size.

 

Things have evidently changed quite a bit over the years - in an article authored by a Google search engineer several weeks ago the average web page is almost 400 KB in size. No longer constrained by modem era bandwidth speeds, we now gobble up dynamic content that is much richer and encapsulated in data files that are many times larger than what we could dream of what for many of us seems not too long ago.

 

Web content is versatile and complex

 

While there are a number of standard mechanisms to transport application data over the Internet, the most pervasive access mechanism to the abovementioned content is HTTP.

 

HTTP and its secure (and slower) sidekick HTTPS have over the years become synonymous with Internet. These are transport mechanisms supported by the browser you are using to read this blog as well as support secure web based applications and on-line shopping transactions.

 

The browsers, with their ever increasing capabilities, have evolved as one of the primary means to transport and present content, and through a variety of add-on's present an increasingly rich and multilayered experience users can interact with through numerous devices, including smartphones and even some TVs.

 

The richness of web content and the great diversity of devices, languages, bandwidth speeds and screen sizes require both content and the systems that supply content to be ever more versatile. Web sites today have the “intelligence” to adapt and optimize the user’s experience based on those and other factors. In order to achieve that, the web content we use is in simpler term an assembly or layer cake of multiple types of content of varying quality and from different sources.

 

The same Google article mentioned above succinctly illustrates this point through some factual data. Current web pages include on average 30 unique images and represent over 40 distinct sources of information, each requiring the browser to fetch these images and data fragments to assemble a web page we can read.

 

The richness of the web meets cloud storage

 

The fragments of data displayed through a web browser can come from a variety of sources and depend on the composition of dynamic and static content being pulled from various sources. While some of these sources are proprietary and secure systems such as the databases containing information, others can be more open content repositories that are optimized for delivery of content objects.

 

Let’s use an online travel booking site for example.

 

Consumers looking for hotel properties for their next vacation will search the hotel or travel site looking for properties that meet criteria such as star ratings, amenities and room availability. Information such as pricing, availability and even reviews will be predominantly textual and prone to change, therefore originate from data systems and are formatted for display in real-time. Much of the compelling content a hotel property may use to convince you into booking a vacation (beyond a great price) is visual – ranging from basic pictures of the property and amenities to captivating 360 degree virtual tours of guest rooms and videos of activities the property offers.

 

This type of content, albeit visually appealing is relatively static. The same digital assets (multimedia files of different kinds) can be displayed to any user browsing through the hotel web site, shared between different properties of the same hotel chain or even used by other travel sites and affiliates promoting this property.

 

While you can still pick up a glossy printed brochure at the local travel agencies these are becoming a thing of the past, online alternatives have evolved to provide a richer and more compelling buying experience as well as a more efficient and effective means to update content and adapt it based on the user, device or the popularity of the content.

 

Content Delivery Networks

 

Another approach that is often used for the last 15 years or so is a Content Delivery Network (CDN for short). These services are designed to replicate copies of files (often images, multimedia and even software applications such as mobile apps) to servers (known as Points of Presence – POPs) globally and maintain an up-to-date repository (cache) that would be accessible to users and their various devices with minimal delay.

 

While CDNs were originally developed to address issues like shopping cart abandonments, there are numerous free and commercial CDN options today in the marketplace that have evolved significantly with the growth and proliferation of the Internet, including services that are optimized for delivery of mobile content, flash content, small objects (small images) or large objects (electronic delivery of software for example).

 

Cloud Storage and CDNs are interrelated and share some similarities and benefits. One such great benefit is achieved by replacing static and sometimes rich and heavy content within a web page with a reference to an object stored on the cloud. That way resource demanding content (due to size or repetition) is offloaded from the web servers such that web sites are able to scale significantly better.

 

Depending on the situation some web sites will work better with one approach, in others both approaches can provide a complementary solution.

 

Shawn Myron is the director of products and services for TELUS hosting and data centres.

 

The vastness of the Internet and human ingenuity creates new breeding ground for innovative forms to share and consume content through the Cloud. Cloud storage entails several characteristics that allows it to be used as an abstracted utility for storing and retrieving these content objects. Stay tuned for the next time where we weigh in on the benefits and risks of cloud storage. If you have any specific questions about the cloud or what you're reading here, please leave a comment.

1,273 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: 10-99, 100+, 1-9, business, cloud_computing, enterprise, shawn_myron, network_management, integrated_network_management, cloud_storage, telus_managed_services
Shawn.Myron
0

As we said in last week's Send in the Clouds: Helping you develop a cloud storage strategy, growth of electronic data is due to a myriad of factors and encompasses the creation of documents and records generated through the collaboration and communications of all stakeholders of an organization. Businesses across industries rely on the availability and accessibility of these systems and the information stored in and delivered through them.

 

While only part of the data is important at any given moment during business-as-usual activity, greater amounts (arguably many times over) of the data generated needs to be backed-up for situations in which information systems are compromised due to an unplanned event.

 

Almost every organization performs some form of data backup to protect itself against events ranging from accidental deletion of data, a system malfunction or a more significant event such as a fire. The techniques used for backup, and the rigour implemented to secure and test backups, vary greatly between organizations and depends on their size, budget, IT governance and in some cases external demands and regulations.

 

Data growth presents complexity and challenges traditional approaches to data backup

 

Last week I mentioned a few resources that illustrate how much data humanity is creating in this “information age”. Another interesting phenomena, some even dub it as a “technological wonder”, is the amazing decrease in the cost of disk storage.

 

According to this blog http://www.dailymarkets.com/economy/2011/06/10/infomation-age-2-0-the-cost-of-hard-disk-space-has-decreased-by-almost-1-5m-times-since-1980/article, the cost of disk decreased over the last 30 years by 1.5 million times! Unfortunately however, while the increase of information generated may be offset by the shrinking cost of disk, it does not result in a “zero-sum-game.”

 

Data growth comes with a hefty hidden cost that is beyond the sheer cost of disk or the technology that supports your backup solution. Ask any IT administrator that deals with the challenges that come with managing a backup system. They will tell you about the complexity involved in backing up huge amounts of user data, the unbearable difficulty of being able to classify data that is important for safe keeping or the daunting task of trying to recover data that spans over numerous instances of daily or weekly data copies.

 

They will probably not share with you that the above-mentiond and other challenges are actually preventing them from doing what is considered a vital IT task - the routine testing of backups to ensure that your corporate data is recoverable just-in-case...

 

Online backup has taken over

 

A number of technologies have evolved over the years to provide organizations with a plethora of backup options ranging in cost and reliability. Traditional approaches to backup have used tape-based solutions, often combining the ability to periodically transfer these tapes for off-site safe keeping thus providing an extra level of insurance to address the most damaging events impacting ones facilities and systems.

 

Many organizations have realized the operational challenges and mounting costs tape back-ups create and are opting for other solutions such as disk based approaches or dedicated backup appliances.

High speed connections and the intelligence of backup software that distinguishes between stale data and the “fresher“ incremental data led to the development of numerous online backup services. As you can see from this story from Google http://www.google.com/trends?q=tape+backup%252C+online+backup&ctab=0&geo=all&date=all&sort=0Trend that tracks search term popularity, “tape backup” has been steadily giving way to online backup.

 

Cloud storage, by virtue of being a remote and scalable storage tier, can provide an effective online backup target for many organizations, especially small and medium businesses, who seek a cost effective and secure backup target for their production data.

 

What about long term data retention?

 

While the backup of everyday production data is important for most businesses, some organizations need to store certain information assets for several years, not expecting (or hoping) to ever use it again. Such requirements may be guided by the business of the organization, corporate law governing the company, industry regulations or in some cases customer specific obligations.

 

Data archiving (and discovery, which is a whole advanced subject of its own) doesn’t always need to be a complex or costly undertaking. However. adequate thought has to be given to developing an archiving policy and a solution that supports the compliance needs of the business. The compounding volumes of data and the requirement for off-premise safekeeping can make the case for including cloud-based digital archiving in an organization’s data archiving strategy, either in addition to or as an alternative to physical retention of tapes, disks or document hard-copies.

 

How does Cloud Storage for data backup work?

Fundamentally, there are two key components required to perform data back-up (and archiving) to a cloud storage service - a back-up process and a back-up destination.

  1. First in order for back-up to work, irrespective of the particular destination in use, some form of back-up process, whether a back-up agent or software is required to scan source data in the existing information (or file) system and transport it back and from a back-up repository.
  2. Second, the cloud storage should be defined as a valid back-up destination the back-up process could use to store new data in, replace existing data with newer versions and retrieve data from.

 

One of the compelling reasons for cloud services, cloud storage included, is the accessibility of these services on a multi-tenant basis by a large number of organizations. As such, the most compelling cloud storage services would be those that would be easily configured as a destination for the back-up process in use by the organization today or for any of the mainstream online back-up software solutions available in the marketplace.

 

Characteristics of data back-up and archiving on the cloud

 

For a cloud storage service to be used for data back-up and archiving there are several characteristics worth considering. These are: interoperability, security, redundancy, on-boarding and recoverability.

 

  1. Interoperability. Unless it is part of a holistic online back-up solution, the service should complement an organization’s existing backup toolset and policy such that it acts as a backup or archiving destination in and of itself. The simplest form of interoperability is when the service is presentable to the company’s network as a logical disk drive or server.
  2. Security. Comprehensive security covering the security layers used for the link connecting the organizations network with the service and logical security that ensures segregation of different customer data sets.
  3. Redundancy.A service that is architected with redundancy significantly reduces the risk of failure and business exposure for subscribers. Some organizations may also benefit from varying degrees of data protection of backups, including mirror copies and geographic replication across different nodes of the cloud service.
  4. Onboarding. Performing the first backup through the network may not be feasible. The service should allow organizations to provide a physical device containing the first full backup of their data through a bulk load service.
  5. Recoverability. Restoring files from backup should be as straightforward as drag-and-drop. When the amount of data to be recovered is too large to transmit over the network the service should allow for the shipment of a device to the client.

 

From our perspective, cloud storage lends itself very well for data backup and archiving. In coming weeks we will discuss additional applications for cloud storage and cover other important considerations as we try to sum up the associated benefits and risks. If you have any specific questions about the cloud or what you're reading here, please leave a comment.

Shawn Myron is the director of products and services for TELUS hosting and data centres.

1,073 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: 10-99, 100+, 1-9, business, cloud_computing, im, shawn_myron, network_management, the_cloud, data_storage
Shawn.Myron
0

At a technology conference last summer, Google’s then CEO Erik Schmidt said that we create as much information in two days now as we did from the dawn of man through 2003. Much has been said about the explosive growth of data being generated, consumed and stored. If you’re not convinced, check out this digital universe page from EMC or this cool graphic (which is probably outdated the moment I type this) from Good magazine.


The confluence of internet adoption, digitization of documents and records, pervasiveness of networked devices, data retention regulations and numerous other factors are the backdrop for this phenomenon.

 

You know this. But chances are if you’re charged with storing your organization’s data (or paying for the infrastructure that will support it) you’re confused about how to evaluate the options at hand and make decisions that support your company’s data storage needs effectively, efficiently and securely.

 

Over the next five weeks, we'll walk you through how to evaluate the options for cloud storage. While cloud storage isn’t for everyone, the flexibility characteristics of cloud services and the obvious savings in capital expenditures required translated into an increase in adoption of over 300% since 2010 with some industry analysts predicting worldwide spending on cloud storage will reach $1 billion in 2013.

 

Recognizing different storage needs

 

Here’s what we know: Not all data is created equal. This massive amount of information being accumulated by users and businesses cannot and should not be stored and delivered using the same level of infrastructure and networks.


Many organizations realize that doing so is both operationally and financially unsustainable, and therefore are adopting a multi-tiered approach to data storage.

 

A myriad of storage technologies have been introduced over the years to address different levels of data criticality and performance. These solutions, including disk based backup, data duplication, and a number of others that power our three tiered managed storage offering, allow organizations to combine different grades of platforms and choose the one most appropriate for the type of data, its users and the retention period it require.

 

The next (front)tier of multi-tiered storage


This evolution from single type of storage, to a multi-tier storage approach is now reaching a state in which cost-effective storage services are being considered to complement internal investments in data storage. These capabilities, by virtue of being Internet accessible services, operate beyond the confines of the corporate network, require significantly less ongoing management effort and provide higher levels of flexibility.

 

As a consumer you can benefit from the flexibility an Internet-accessible storage service such as Dropbox has to offer when you required anywhere/anytime to your files. Home users can subscribe to a backup service such as Mozy and more recently store their music collection on Amazon or Apple. These new kinds of utility type services, together with their benefits and risks are not restricted to consumers as more businesses are now considering cloud storage alternatives for their needs.

 

Case in point is one of the early cloud infrastructure providers, Amazon Web Services, who has been operating a service called S3 for several years. This multi-tenant storage service has been the foundation for many early stage and cash strapped companies over the years and is one of a few services being considered a cheap and flexible storage alternative for non critical storage in a growing number of organizations.

 

Internet-accessible and important to mention, multi-tenant, business grade storage services are emerging as viable storage tier for some types of data, projects or applications.


More to come in the next few weeks about evaluating the options for cloud storage, including case studies on cloud storage, the benefits and risks cloud storage and what to consider when choosing a cloud storage provider.

 

Shawn Myron is the director of products and services for TELUS' hosting and data centres.

 

Questions about the cloud and whether it's right for your company? Leave a comment here.

966 Views 0 Comments Permalink Tags: 10-99, 100+, 1-9, business, cloud, it_security, enterprise, it, shawn_myron, network_management, integrated_network_management


Actions

Popular Blog Posts

Share
Subscribe to emails from TELUS Subscribe to blog
TELUS.com  |  Legal  |  Privacy policy  |  © 2012 TELUS Communications Company