When ESX 5 was released in July this year, VMware displayed once again why their product is highly regarded and used in organisation large and small though out the world. A number of improvements on the existing platform and a range on new features makes ESX 5 even more attractive than previous versions.
Considering that Windows XP is 9 years old (which is somewhat archaic in software and Operating System world!) and Microsoft stopped mainstream support and development on XP in 2009 the adoption for Windows 7 is gaining momentum in corporates around the world. Does your organization have a strategy for implementing Windows 7 in your environment and realizing the benefits that it can bring?
Word is certainly getting around town that Cloud Computing is a phenomenon that requires some attention in your business. The question is not anymore whether you consider Cloud Computing but rather how best you utilise it to realise the benefits that it can bring to your organisation. In my opinion one of Cloud's heavyweight benefits is as an enabler of Disaster Recovery solutions. Many a times I have seen that organisations rely on a backup tape to be their saviour should the ultimate crisis cause them to lose access to their production environment. However the time (Recovery Time) it can take to restore this data after sourcing appropriate infrastructure to restore it on can be significant. Even if one is succesful after an arduous effort, data is as current as your last good backup (Recover Point) and one could be a week behind at this stage! The truth is that most businesses probably aren’t geared to match what their business defines as an acceptable Recovery Time Objective or Recovery Point Objective and there are ample stats to prove that most businesses do not survive if they suffer a complete loss of their production environment for an extended period of time (Gartner claim this to be 3 days!!!). But one can easily find themself between undesirable benefits...to mitigate the risk from an unlikely large scale disaster event may require a substantial investment in a DR environment similar to the production environment including all the Microsoft software...unless of course the license was purchased initially with Software Assurance and I can only assume that this is highly unlikely.
Ok now that your company has decided to embark on the Cloud journey in the near future (and all statistics suggest that you are definitely in the majority)…what next? Apart from selecting the appropriate Cloud platform, how would you migrate your applications, users and data ensuring that none of this is compromised whilst ensuring that there is no downtime suffered during the migration. As simplistic as the Cloud model appears there are real considerations and challenges to overcome before an organisation can realise its benefits… “As for the future, your task is not to forsee it, but to enable it.”- Antoine de Saint Exupery, poet and pilot (1900-1944). And enable it you shall with some meticulous planning!
There has been much hype around the industry and Cloud Computing has been touted (even in CeBIT) to revolutionise the way businesses are going to approach their infrastructure and application requirements in the very near future. For the saavy businesses, the Cloud holds the following benefits: