EDITOR’ S QUESTION

Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A + Q + A +

However, things are looking positive with Gartner forecasting worldwide public cloud revenue to grow 21.4 % in 2018.

Let’ s have a look at some common use cases where those benefits can be gained.

A test / development / acceptance environment

Every business needs an environment for testing solutions, development and acceptance. In an ideal world, these should be three separate environments and they should be the same as( or similar to) your production environment.

Unfortunately, the number of enterprises that have the resources available to use best practices is very limited. And those few that have the technical resources to do this often complain that there aren’ t enough people to maintain such environments.

Why not use the public cloud for these scenarios? Organisations can create copies of the production environment in a public cloud and grant access to developers, test engineers and workload owners to that environment. After a project is finished, that environment can simply be shut down.

Patching, updates and upgrades

Many enterprises have a change advisory board( CAB) that needs to approve all changes( bug fixes, security patches and functionality enhancements) that will happen in a production environment.

The best practice is to implement these as quickly as possible but only after they have been tested thoroughly to prevent any major issues making it to the live environment.

The best way to do this is to mimic your production environment as well as possible when testing changes. Again, this is impossible for most companies due to a lack of resources.

Enter the public cloud again. By using copies of the production environment and restoring them into the public cloud, organisations can conduct effective testing and documenting of all those changes and feed that information into the change request plan. What’ s even better is that potential back-out plans can also be tested, so the organisation can be prepared in case something wrong still goes into production.

After all the tests and documentation, the environment in the public cloud can be turned off( or even destroyed) to save on costs.

Disaster recovery testing

How frequently does your business test its backups or its disaster recovery plans? Weekly? Monthly? Yearly maybe? Or perhaps even never?

In many cases, leadership teams are not even aware of this and believe that these plans are readily available, updated and tested on a regular basis. The reasons why this doesn’ t happen are similar to the previous two scenarios: There aren’ t enough technical resources, people or time to do it in.

Can we use the public cloud again for this scenario? The answer is obviously yes, and the way to do this is again very similar to the previous scenarios. By using the latest copies of the production environment, organisations can restore the full production( or specific workloads) to the public cloud, make sure backups are quarantined from the production environment and perform backup and recovery tasks and tests with speed.

And the cloud brings even more advantages. You don’ t need to have the resources on premises, the process takes less time and effort and it’ s easier to perform. You gain peace of mind with the knowledge that, even in a worst-case scenario, you can restore your production environment using the public cloud if there are no on-premises resources available.

36 INTELLIGENTCIO www. intelligentcio. com