Achievements of Cloud Computing
With the pace of technological change it is beneficial to let a server farm take care of processing needs for smaller companies instead of trying to do everything in house. Many companies see this as a major goal when considering the use of cloud computing; however there are other motivations as well.
Many of the largest companies that have cloud computing services available to their customers have in place service level agreements. For those unfamiliar with service level agreements, also know as SLAs, what this entails is a binding contract whereupon service companies agree on a specified level of service or uptime.
An SLA gives potential customers the confidence for them to use cloud computing services over what may be a long standing tradition for an organization to have their IT services hosted in-house. The major role of a system administrator is to make sure that uptime is constant.
Usage of cloud technology can help administrators achieve this because of the redundancy of cloud computing. However, a bigger issue may lie in the event of a disaster recovery or backup failure issue.
Cloud Computing Impact on Server
Most server farms are located in a well planned and secure location but one cannot be too careful to ponder the fact that something could always go wrong. The possibility is always out there to consider. Most SLAs promote an uptime level of 99.999% but cannot always provide for data redundancy to be at that level.
This is something that many administrators must look out for.
Although the cloud may always be online, the data necessarily may not be if something were to go wrong somewhere. Although the chances of this are slim, it can indeed occur. Many administrators do realize this as an issue. So while it may be a major goal for the purveyors of cloud computing to offer SLAs with defined uptime it cannot always be true that the data will be “up”.
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