Issue link: https://insights.oneneck.com/i/1301386
8 oneneck.com Businesses depend on their IT system. Reliability and availability are significant concerns and one of the primary reasons many are hesitant to buy cloud services, especially for mission- cri cal business applica ons and data. Availability in the cloud will be cri cal for its long-term success with an enterprise. It's not limited to availability of just the applica ons and data being u lized that ma ers, but also the need for it to be accessible to the consumer any me, anyplace without delay. To address these challenges, cloud providers offer SLAs (service level agreements) for "up me" and "availability". Delivering on a stringent SLA requires a provider's commitment to best prac ces and processes, a thoroughly redundant architecture, 24/7 staffing by trained and experience technicians, and best of breed hardware, so ware and network products. While availability SLAs o en meet the needs of many cloud-compa ble applica ons, high-end applica ons tend to require more than just an availability guarantee. Businesses need to define a set of applica on-specific performance metrics that govern performance and enforce them. This can o en be achieved through the use of applica on performance monitoring tools that generate analy cs and repor ng to give you the data you need to ensure your applica on systems are opera ng at peak efficiency. In addi on, evaluate your workload. The research firm IDC reports that understanding the characteris cs of workloads is crucial when deploying applica ons to an organiza on's cloud environment. To op mize your cloud deployment you need to understand an applica on's requirements in six key areas in order to place it correctly: Performance Security Compliance Data protec on Storage Automa on A er evalua on, applica ons can be ranked as Tier 1, Tier 2, or Tier 3. The Tier 1 are cri cal applica ons with the strongest requirements for reliable performance or applica on security while Tier 2 and Tier 3 have less stringent demands. With these sets of criteria in mind, businesses can then match their applica ons and data to the appropriate cloud to ensure performance and high-availability. Performance and Availability Challenge 6