CLOUD, FOG, OR SMOG?

OUR FORECAST ON BUSINESS CONTINUITY AND THE CLOUD

| 2012 StorageCraft. All rights reserved.

INTRODUCTION

You cant go anywhere in the IT world these days without hearing about the cloud. It seems to be everywhere, in every new product, the solution to every problem. But as with any hot new trend, youre probably wondering if the cloud, cloud computing, or cloud-based backup live up to the hype. Is this something you should use yourself? If youre a managed service provider (MSP) or a value-added reseller (VAR), is it something you should recommend to your clients? Before you jump in, you need to know how the cloud is positioned today, understand its many value propositions, and look at how you can get the most out of it in your own business.

This paper was adapted from a keynote address delivered at SMB Nation 2011 by Matt Urmston. Matt has worked in the IT industry for more than twenty years, focusing on backup, disaster recovery, and archiving solutions. He has worked as a technical marketing manager, a sales engineer, a product manager, and as an independent consultant for Legato/EMC. Currently, he is senior technical product manager for StorageCraft Technology Corporation.

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ARE THERE BRIGHT SKIES AHEAD?

If you listen to the marketers of the world, using the cloud for backup, storage, and disaster recovery seems like a no-brainer. A simple Internet search yields countless testimonials on its manifold benefits, some of which might include the following:

Customers can maintain business continuity in the case of a site disaster.

Even though most disasters are smaller in scope, businesses always need to prepare for the possibility of a large-scale disruption of their site. Everything from hurricanes to tornados to construction trucks accidently driving through an office have demolished businesses in the past and they will continue doing so in the future. Having data stored in the cloud protects it from such on-site disasters.

Customers are not dependent on a single server.

Data stored in the cloud can be distributed across a wide array of servers, which are often geographically disparate. Since every machine will fail sooner or later, storing data in the cloud seems to offer good protection.

Customers have no direct hardware dependency.

In addition to not having to worry about the failure of a single server, cloud adopters dont necessarily need to have any hardware on-site. This can reduce costs, among other benefits.

Customers can provision virtual storage containers that are larger than the physical space available.
The advent of virtual technology has made it possible for cloud adopters to create storage that is larger than the physical server thats hosting it, cutting costs.

Customers can purchase and expand cloud services dynamically.

Whether a cloud adopter is purchasing storage for the first time or growing what they currently have, the pay-as-you go model makes it easy to get just the right amount. This applies not only to storage space, but to hardware and to dedicated IT staff as well.

Customers can access all of their storage from a single interface anywhere in the world.
Whether its on a computer, a smart phone, or some other device, cloud adopters have access to their data anywhere.

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OR JUST THUNDER CLOUDS?

Looking at these benefits, its easy to get swept away by the cloud. Unfortunately, theres thunder on the horizon. The truth is that theres still a lot of uncertainty about the cloud. For example, Larry Ellison, the CEO of Oracle, recently told the Wall Street Journal, The interesting thing about cloud computing is that weve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we already do. I cant think of anything that isnt cloud computing with all of these announcements. Maybe Im an idiot, but I have no idea what anyone is talking about. What is it? Its complete gibberish. Its insane. When is this idiocy going to stop?1 Ellisons quote appears in an article called Oracles Ellison Nails Cloud Computing, suggesting the CEO is not alone in his suspicions and confusion. But the darkened sky is more than simply uncertainty at the proper way to use the latest marketing buzzword. In practice, the cloud has run into some serious problems. Consider, for example, this small selection of headlines from the last few years:

Amazon Cloud Goes Down, Takes Every Hot Startup With It2 Google, Microsoft cloud crashes: Is this the new normal?3 Why Amazons cloud Titanic went down4 EMC Atmos Goes Offline5 Apple MobileMe gets De-Mobilized6 Gmail outage passes 24 hours for some7 The consistency with which major cloud providers have failed is alarming and some experts predict that it will only get worse. According to Gartner, By 2014, a major cloud-computing service provider will suffer a cascading failure, resulting in unrecoverable data loss and permanent business impact for multiple customers.8

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THE TRUTH ABOUT CLOUD ADOPTION

Of course, what weve shown so far are the extremes. As with every emerging technology, there are loud voices pushing for adoption, frustrated voices complaining about failure, and the truth somewhere in between. A cloud adoption study published by Microsoft in 2011 offers a good perspective. They surveyed 3,258 companies globally with between two and two hundred and fifty employees and asked them about how they were currently using the cloud and how they expected to use the cloud in the future. Microsoft identified nine specific services that could be adopted in the cloud (including accounting software, project management, and data storage and backup) and asked participating companies to evaluate their current usage of these services, as well as their projected usage in three years. The survey also distinguished between free cloud services and paid ones. The results clearly demonstrate the patchy adoption of cloud services thus far. For example, at the time of the survey, 66 percent of the respondents used some kind of cloud service (free or paid). Within three years, that number will grow to 74 percent.

Of that, however, only 39 percent will be using paid services. And 64 percent of those paying for the cloud will only pay for three services or fewer.9 The survey also reveals other telling features of the cloud as it is and will be in the near future. Eighty-two percent of the respondents claimed that buying a cloud service from a local provider was important, and those who did purchase services from local providers were more likely to use paid services.10 At the same time, those who dont plan on paying for cloud services were more concerned about control than anything else. Fiftyseven percent wanted to keep things in house because they believed theyd have better control.11 Fifty-three percent said they wouldnt acquire cloud services because they simply didnt know enough about them to make a good decision.12 In summarizing the study, Marco Limena, vice president of business channels for Worldwide Communications Sector at Microsoft, assessed the current and future state of cloud computing: Cloud adoption will be gradual, and SMBs will continue to operate in a hybrid model with an increasing blend between off-premises and traditional onpremises infrastructure, for the foreseeable future.13

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PARTLY CLOUDY WITH A CHANCE OF RAIN

Its difficult for anyone these days to navigate this current state of the cloud. Which technologies do you adopt? How deeply do you invest? Is the technology ready for you to jump in all the way? For MSPs and VARs, the question is even more complicated. Not only do you need to figure out which cloud technologies will work best for your own business, but you need to determine how cloud offerings fit into your products and services as well. The high-level summary of these various studies is that businesses will be slow to embrace cloud computing and when they do, theyll still maintain some kind of on-site backup. At the same time, when they do adopt, it will likely be from local, trusted sources. This means that as a solution provider, you need to be ready with the cloud story youre going to tell. At StorageCraft, our forecast for the cloud is simply this: partly cloudy with a chance of rain. In other words, cloud computing isnt going to go away, but it is going to grow slowly and is still fraught with potential risks. As such, weve prepared a number of recommendations for partners who are looking to push forward: Be the expert (or find a partner who is). Understand the cloud providers SLAs. Build solutions that meet client needs and budget. Dont rush.

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BE THE EXPERT (OR FIND A PARTNER WHO IS)

Consider again this statistic from the Microsoft study: 53% of respondents agreed with the statement I dont know enough about cloud computing to be able to make decisions about using cloud service. This is a significant percentage and it underscores the need for MSPs and VARs to become the experts, to become proficient at educating their clients in the ramifications of the cloud. The businesses described by this quote are simply sitting back and waiting for someone to help them understand the trend. If youre not an expert, or havent partnered with someone who is, then youre missing your chance to educate that client and meet his or her need. Clients are coming to you to tell them what to do when it comes to their backup and disaster recovery. They dont have the time to become experts on the cloud, so if youre going to offer it, you need to fill that role. And if you cant (or choose not to), be sure to partner with a cloud provider who can.

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UNDERSTAND THE CLOUD PROVIDERS SLAs

Most IT service providers guarantee a specific level of service to their customers. Whether its 99.9% uptime, no data loss, or guaranteed replication to another server, these service level agreements (SLAs) are crucial to how the provider operates. In fact, in many cases, the SLA becomes the differentiator between one organization and another. When looking to partner with cloud providers, then, its vital that you understand those SLAs and evaluate which offers the best service for your needs. If you are going to be offering cloud services to your own clients through a third party, then you need to know exactly what youre offering. At the same time, its just as important that you take all SLAs with a grain of salt. Some guarantees are virtually impossible to enforce. For example, what if your cloud provider goes out of business? Imagine youve moved all of your own data or the data of your clients into storage with a cloud provider that files for bankruptcy. How can they possibly meet their promised level of service then? When Amazons EC2 cloud service crashed in 2011, the fallibility of SLAs became apparent. The letter reprinted in the sidebar is one Amazon sent to a client following the crash (as reported on MSNBC). Not only is the clients data completely lost, but if they do not remove the corrupted file, theyll continue to pay storage charges. Imagine having to explain this data loss to your own clients. As important as it is to understand the SLAs of the providers youre partnering with, its just as important to recognize that no SLA is completely bullet proof. This is that chance of rain in our forecast and frankly, you need to be the umbrella. Consider each SLA and look for points of weakness, then bolster your own offering to protect your own clients. As one Amazon customer told its own clients, Our development team is also hard at work to limit the impact of any future AWS interruptions.15 Dont wait until after a disaster to implement procedures that control the way your cloud provider affects your clients.

Where SLAs Break Down

Hello, A few days ago we sent you an email letting you know that we were working on recovering an inconsistent data snapshot of one or more of your Storage volumes. We are very sorry, but ultimately our efforts to manually recover your volume were unsuccessful. The hardware failed in such a way that we could not forensically restore the data. What we were able to recover has been made available via a snapshot, although the data is in such a state that it may have little to no utility... If you have no need for this snapshot, please delete it to avoid incurring storage charges. We apologize for this volume loss and any impact to your business. Sincerely,14

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BUILD SOLUTIONS THAT MEET CLIENT NEEDS AND BUDGET

It should be apparent by now that the cloud is not a one-sizefits-all solution. As such, it is imperative that you understand your customers business models, their needs, and their budgets as you create solutions to move their data to the cloud. Within the context of those needs and budgets, you can then work to build a backup and disaster recovery plan that takes advantage of the cloud, but still protects them from the rain. To start out, we always recommend that you include a local backup in your plan. That way, if your cloud provider goes out of business or has that major cascading failure predicted by Gartner, your data is protected. Once you have that local copy, you can create an off-site solution. The traditional off-site model is to simply replicate to a data center somewhere. Whether youre using a colocation center or simply storage at your office or home, the data center model allows you to recover easily from a sitespecific disaster. Data centers are not technically a cloud solution and it does not offer many of those benefits, but they are still a perfectly respectable and reliable solution. A second solution is to create a corporate cloud. This is a hybrid approach. Here, youve taken your corporate cloud and virtualized it so you can quickly provision machines and work with elastic data sets. This allows for dynamic growth and the manipulation of images youve moved there. You can spin them up, restore them to a virtual or physical machine and so on. A corporate cloud even allows you to test disaster recovery plans. A corporate cloud can meet requirements of many executives to back up to the cloud without relinquishing control of your customers data to a third party. With a corporate cloud, you still have complete control. Unfortunately, with a corporate cloud, you take on all the cost and risk yourself, which is no small thing. The third option, of course, is simply replicating to the cloud. There are many benefits to this, but its important to remember that once you replicate data to a third party cloud provider, youre no longer in control of it. You cant go into their cloud environment and do failovers or test restores with your own data. There are a few services that allow this, but not many. As you make your cloud plan, then, you need to be sure that youre meeting your customers needs. If all they need is to transfer their data to the cloud, then it may be the perfect solution. If, however, they need to recover that data quickly, if their recovery time objective is a day or less, then the cloud may not work. The time it takes to pull data back from the cloud, whether over the Internet or by some other route, may be a deal breaker. Of course you could always mix these options, replicating your local backup to a data center, for instance, and then replicating it into the cloud. In any event, its imperative as you create your cloud offering that you understand what your customer actually needs. Each of the options offers different benefits and drawbacks and you wont do yourself any favors trying to force a solution on a client that doesnt meet their needs. No one likes to be sold something they dont need.

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DONT RUSH

Most people think about the cloud like its an application. You buy it, you install it, and thats it. But thats not really how it works. Using the cloud is really a phased process. Once you understand the needs of your customers, you can provide solutions that allow them to take advantage of the cloud as they truly need it. The research presented in this paper suggests that cloud adoption is going to happen slowly, as users gradually move business-line applications to the cloud as needed. This allows them to get a sense of the benefits the cloud is actually providing in a measured and controlled way. As an MSP or VAR, you should do the same. You dont need to throw everything into the cloud all at once (partly cloudy, remember?). You can take the time to learn how cloud computing really fits into your offering and how it can meet the needs of your customers.

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GETTING OUT OF THE SMOG

The truth is that for all the hype about its benefits, the cloud is not yet living up to its promises for many people. That doesnt mean it will never meet those expectations, but right now we should consider it for what it is: an emerging group of technologies that have promise but that are still trying to figure out exactly how they work. With that perspective, we can be smart. We can take our time, and we can develop cloud strategies that meet the needs of our clients and that make sense.

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NOTES

1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Dan Farber, Oracles Ellison nails cloud computing, CNET News, September 26, 2008, http://news.cnet. com/8301-13953_3-10052188-80.html. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry, Amazon Cloud Goes Down, Takes Every Hot Startup With It, Business Insider, April 21, 2011, http://www.businessinsider. com/why-is-reddit-down-2011-4. Kevin McCaney, Google, Microsoft cloud crashes: Is this the new normal? Washington Technology, September 13, 2011, http://washingtontechnology. com/articles/2011/09/12/google-microsoft-cloudoutages.aspx. David Goldman, Why Amazons cloud Titanic went down, CNNMoney, April 22, 2011, http://money. cnn.com/2011/04/22/technology/amazon_ec2_ cloud_outage/index.htm. Dave Raffo, EMC Atmos Online goes offline, other cloud storage providers look to step. up, SearchCloudStorage, July 2, 2010, http:// searchcloudstorage.techtarget.com/news/1516117/ EMC-Atmos-Online-goes-offline-other-cloudstorage-providers-look-to-step-up. Andrew R. Hickey, 10 Notable Cloud Outages and What Caused Them, slide 1, Apple MobileMe Gets De-mobilized, CRN, February 23, 2010, http://www. crn.com/slide-shows/applications-os/223100370/10notable-cloud-outages-and-what-caused-them. htm?pgno=4.

7.

Seth Weintraub, Gmail outage passes 24 hours for some (updated), CNNMoney, February 28, 2011, http://tech.fortune.cnn. com/2011/02/28/gmail-outage-passes-24-hoursfor-some/?section=magazines_fortune&utm_ source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_ca mpaign=Feed%3A+rss%2Fmagazine s_fortune+%28Fortune+Magazine%29. 8. Jay Heiser, Will Your Data Rain When the Cloud Bursts?, Gartner, September 24, 2010, ID Number: G00206825. 9. SMB Cloud Adoption Study Dec 2010Global Report. Microsoft, March 24, 2011. 7. 10. Ibid. 17. 11. Ibid. 16. 12. Ibid. 13. Microsoft unveils findings from its SMB Cloud Adoption Study, Microsoft, March 24, 2011, http:// www.microsoft.com/presspass/emea/presscentre/ pressreleases/MSSMBCloudAdoption.mspx. 14. Henry Blodgett, Amazons cloud crash destroyed many customers data, Technolog on MSNBC, April 28, 2011, http://technolog.msnbc.msn.com/_ news/2011/04/28/6549775-amazons-cloud-crashdestroyed-many-customers-data. 15. Ibid.

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ABOUT STORAGECRAFT

At StorageCraft, the goal of complete business continuity drives everything we do. Our flagship, StorageCraft ShadowProtect, is a full-featured, best-in-class BDR solution that is both fast and reliable. Imagine a backup solution that takes full, differential, and incremental images of your disks, including not only your data, but your OS and applications too. Perform complete, bare-metal restores every time. Our Hardware Independent RestoreTM technology restores to any machine. Access files at a specific point in time and recover data on a granular level. Boot your ShadowProtect images as virtual machines (VMs) with VirtualBootTM. Manage multiple instances of ShadowProtect across multiple environments.

the most of your backup images. It includes the following features: HeadStart Restore leverages your ShadowProtect images before a disaster by prestaging them as a VM, so recovery can happen in mere minutes. ShadowStreamTM is an alternative file transfer technology that offers speeds up to 5 times faster than FTP and does not require separate hardware. intelligentFTPTM transforms traditional FTP into a BDR-friendly transfer solution by offering automatic network replication with greater control over what, how, and when you replicate. ShadowControl ImageManager also offers other powerful business continuity features such as consolidation, verification, retention, and notification. We also offer ShadowProtect Granular Recovery for Exchange to give you complete, granular access to images of your Exchange servers.

CONTACT US
StorageCraft Technology Corporation 11850 South Election Road, Suite 100 Draper, Utah 84020 USA Phone: 801.545.4700 Fax: 801.545.4705 www.storagecraft.com contactus@storagecraft.com

MAKING THE MOST OF BACKUP

We also have a growing array of tools that unlock the full potential of your ShadowProtect images. StorageCraft ShadowControlTM ImageManager is a fullfeatured companion to ShadowProtect that lets you make

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