14 DAY TRIAL // Cloud services need some fundamental features to be successful, including enhanced reliability and security, but that does not fully eliminate the possibility for unfortunate events to occur.
Cloud services providers need to take all the necessary measures to ensure that incidents and events that would affect reliability are dealt with as soon as possible, but there is also a question of recoverability that needs to be taken into consideration.
When choosing a cloud provider, customers have to inquire about these measures too, and the latest installment of Microsoft Trustworthy Computing’s Cloud Fundamentals Video Series provides them with some info on what they can ask.
In this video, Tim Rains, director, Trustworthy Computing, asks David Bills, Microsoft’s chief reliability strategist, about some of the incidents that may occur and on the manner in which recovery can be made.
“It’s not a question of whether an incident will occur; it’s strictly a matter of when. We want our customers to think about, and develop a really good understanding of how their service provider is going to respond to that issue,” David said.
He also explains the difference between some of the recurring incidents, which range from network saturation to human administrative errors, and a set of unforeseen failures, such as the aftermath of a hurricane, or even massive physical damage.
Moreover, David Bills notes that cloud services should be designed so as to be capable of detecting these types of failures and to respond to them automatically.
According to him, the entire service should be built in a manner in which it could fail over and restore the service to an alternative site.
The latest video in the aforementioned series, embedded below, also enables you to “hear more about what David had to say on the topic of recoverability and what customers should be thinking about when choosing a cloud vendor,” Tim Rains notes in a blog post.