Jon Lucas, Co-Director at Hyve Managed Hosting, considers how businesses can manage workloads on public, private and hybrid cloud networks more effectively by having the right SLAs in place.

There can be no denying the rapid rise and ever-growing importance of public, private and hybrid cloud in the modern age. With 83% of enterprise workloads expected to be in the cloud by 2020, those responsible for the management of these workloads need to ensure that they are getting the most from their providers. The cloud market is highly competitive and businesses looking to invest need to cut through the noise and make sure their provider is speaking their language.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are one of the most important, but commonly overlooked, considerations when choosing a cloud services provider. Currently, too many companies often blindly place trust in empty promises that offer blanketed and vague SLAs. These are rarely personal, reliable or realistic and ultimately result in poor practice on both the provider’s and the customer’s part. Increasing levels of compliance for key areas such as data protection, as well as more experienced customers who are demanding better service levels, is making tailored SLAs more viable.

At their base level, SLAs act as a layer of protection for both the customer and the provider. Having SLAs in place ensures that each party knows what it can expect from the other. Having a document that clearly spells out each party’s responsibilities can act as a reference point that ensures neither side can plead ignorance in a sticky situation. The impact when SLAs don’t work properly, or are only considered when a serious service problem arises, can be detrimental.

So, what are the key considerations businesses should keep front of mind when it comes to assessing prospect hosting providers and their SLAs?

Availability and continuity

The Internet never sleeps – and neither should your business. As the world becomes increasingly connected and contactable whenever and wherever, the necessity to remain ‘always-on’ is greater than ever. It is important that your company sets its expectations for service availability from the get-go and that the provider has the infrastructure in place to be able to meet those minimum requirements. For example, if a provider offers to fix a server that is down within 20 minutes, you should be sceptical, as this would only be achievable if there were manpower and spares available on-site. If the provider you have chosen cannot realistically meet your requirements, they should offer an alternative, better suited, solution.

Security and stability

We live in tightly regulated times, yet we still hear of network and data breaches almost daily in the news. Breaches like these cost your business money and time, and ultimately risk its reputation. A hosting provider should be offering to provide regular security patching and vulnerability scanning to avoid this. If your business has large amounts of confidential data, you must warn your prospective hosting provider and they should tailor these security measures to suit your needs. Don’t let a mistake like lack of communication, on either side, mean unnecessary costs for your business.

Flexibility

Nothing stays the same for long in the world of tech, which your potential new hosting provider will understand better than anyone. Businesses drop the old and acquire the newest services at lightning speed. As a result of this, the SLAs that accompany these services must be flexible. They are living documents that need to adapt to changes either to your business’s service requirements or to the vendor’s capabilities. It is up to both parties in the relationship to ensure that SLAs are kept up-to-date, relative to developments unique to your business.

Reputation

One of the simplest ways to make a decision on choosing a hosting provider is asking for proof of their reputation. A reliable hosting provider will be proud of their SLAs and how they back them up so the key is to ask how they do this. While providers can promise a tailored service to each of their customers, you want to make sure that they are capable of meeting what they are guaranteeing. As well as asking for it outright, information on performance can be acquired in a couple of ways. Trustworthy service providers will showcase their own statistics online. Companies who are in the market for a new provider can then compare these with competitors’. As honesty is always the best policy, openness like this is a good sign.

If this information isn’t available, however, asking other companies similar to your own for feedback on their experience may prove even more useful. Society places so much trust in reviews in other sectors like travel and entertainment – why not translate that over to SLAs in service providers, too? Prepare questions to ask them based on metrics that are important to you. After all, although similar, other companies’ requirements will not be identical to your own. Building a relationship with your hosting provider will undoubtedly lead to better service; it is very easy to let down a faceless company, and much harder to let down someone you know

If it goes wrong

Unfortunately, nothing is ever perfect and there will undoubtedly be issues at some point. However, ensuring that you have set metrics from the start of your partnership with a hosting provider should make these issues a lot easier to handle. Having SLAs in place also means you can lay out what the business expects to receive from its provider in the event of an issue, including compensation in the form of refunds or service credits that can be used in the future.

The key thing to remember when considering SLAs is to think carefully and pick those that protect the most vital aspects of the service you are paying for from your provider. Trying to measure too many metrics will take a lot of time to analyse, and will create an enormous burden of data. Choosing what is most important to your company in terms of SLAs should be easy to relay from your business objectives, and figuring these out will help you in finding a hosting provider capable of translating them into SLAs. Make the SLAs fit your company, don’t make your company fit the SLAs. When you and your service provider tailor these to what’s right for your business, it can only reap benefits, both in the short and long-run for your service, your customers and your company growth.

The post Hosting providers: could SLAs be the key to the best partnership? appeared first on UK Tech News.

Zerto, an industry leader for IT resilience, have announced the full findings of its sponsored IDC survey, Worldwide Business Resilience Readiness Thought Leadership Survey. The subsequent report revealed that 91% of respondents have experienced a tech-related disruption in the past two years, and yet 82% of respondents said data protection and recovery are important to their digital transformation projects.

The white paper illustrates a perception gap between IT and business decision makers regarding the importance of data availability and success of digital transformation/IT transformation initiatives.

Key indicators of perception gap, supported by research findings:

• More than 80% of respondents indicated senior management does not believe there is a high correlation between the quality/availability of data and organisational success
• Only 11.4% of respondents indicated the highest level of IT resilience maturity
• 91.2% of respondents reported experiencing some type of business disruption in the last two years (from a variety of causes)
• 56% of respondents had an event resulting in unrecoverable data loss, and the top causes of this loss were often avoidable (i.e. the event occurred during gap between backups, backup/recovery system failures, etc.)

Optimising resilience planning, the report says, plays an important role in minimising the financial burden and negative impact of IT-related business disruption. These types of disruptions, the research details, are costing organisations significantly:

• 36.6% of respondents experienced a direct loss of revenue
• 61.4% of respondents suffered either major or minor damage to company reputation
• 26.1% respondents indicated a permanent loss of customers

The white paper concludes that because most respondents have not optimised their IT resilience strategy, cloud and transformation initiatives are at risk of delay or failure.

However, 90% of respondents indicated intent to increase their IT resilience investments over the next two years.

For many organisations, efforts to improve resilience are taking place against a backdrop of changing data protection and disaster recovery needs:

• 57.8% expect data protection requirements to become more complex
• 93.4% of respondents are likely to pursue convergence of backup and disaster recovery tools to eliminate redundancy
• 44.8% of respondents are experiencing an expansion in data demands

Interestingly, almost 100% of respondents anticipate cloud playing a role in their organisation’s future disaster recovery or data protection plans. But today, according to respondents, integrated adoption of cloud-based protection solutions remains low:

• 45.6% currently deploy cloud backup tools
• 39% use cloud archive solutions
• 37% use disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) tools

Currently only 12.4% of IT budgets (on average) are spent on IT resilience hardware/software/cloud solutions.

Phil Goodwin, Research Director, IDC, commented:

“These survey results indicate that most respondents have not optimised their IT resilience strategy, evidenced by the high levels of IT and business-related disruptions. However, the majority of organisations surveyed will undertake a transformation, cloud, or modernisation project within the next two years. This illustrates the need for all organisations to begin architecting a plan for IT resilience to ensure the success of these initiatives.”

“Without such a plan, the high prevalence of disruptive events, unplanned downtime, and data loss indicated by respondents will continue to put cloud and transformation initiatives at risk of delay or failure — creating a financial burden and negative impact to an organisation’s competitive advantage.”

Avi Raichel, CIO, Zerto, commented:

“The resilience of business IT is under constant pressure. Malicious attacks and outages are causing enormous levels of disruption, and it’s clear that for many organisations their ability to avoid and mitigate IT-related disruption is not where it needs to be, and is actually holding back their ability to focus on innovating. IT leaders and professionals clearly understand the pressing requirement for better resilience, and it’s to everyone’s benefit that the momentum behind IT resilience is really building.”

For more insights from the Worldwide Business Resilience Readiness Thought Leadership Survey, read in full here.

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Digital banking alternative Revolut, one of the most data-driven companies in the world, has achieved true democratisation of data with the help of Exasol, the analytics database. Despite data volumes increasing 20-fold over the past twelve months, queries that used to take hours are now completed in seconds, enabling self-serve data analytics for all employees across business functions.

“We are an extremely data-driven company,” said Demeter Sztanko, Head of Data Engineering at Revolut. “We maintain around 800 dashboards and run around 100,000 SQL queries on a daily basis across the organisation. When we looked at cloud vendors, it quickly became apparent that running the analytics we wanted to could become prohibitive but not with Exasol. In addition, we also love the flexibility that Exasol offers because they do not lock us in to any single environment and this is very important for us.”

Revolut is the fastest growing fintech in the world and handles every aspect of money management. It achieved unicorn status in 2018 and now has more than six million customers globally. Revolut runs a multi-node Exasol cluster on Google Cloud Platform. Exasol offers unparalleled flexibility, with on-premises, cloud or hybrid and multi-cloud deployment options, which means there is no vendor lock-in for their customers. This allows Revolut to expand to countries where Google Cloud Platform is not available.

“We wanted to ensure everyone has access to the data they need for their daily work in a simple and efficient manner, and Exasol has helped us achieve that. Working with Exasol is very personal for me because I know the team is always ready to help. I have visited their headquarters and I have met everyone on the tech team personally,” added Sztanko.

Revolut’s data science and engineering team has ambitious plans for the future, which include working together with Exasol to make full use of Exasol’s capabilities to apply machine learning tools to its processes and empower Revolut employees with the data analysis capabilities they need.

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