Enterprise-Ready? 10 Questions For Your Cloud Provider
F5 Networks is a pretty cool company. Anybody who offers a solution that maintains a user connection to a VM moved half way around the world would at least seem to have the mobility thing working for them, which puts them on top of the management stack, so to speak. I offer these 10 questions from their PowerPoint playbook designed to help you determine if your cloud provider is enterprise-ready.
- How do they instrument and report to ensure end-user performance SLAs are met?
- How do they enable access control and ensure it remains with the enterprise?
- How do they enable network and application security, and demonstrate that enforcement?
- What models do they provide for disaster recovery, elasticity, scale and high availability?
- Can the enterprise easily mimic their existing architectures, still maintain control and easily move between cloud partners?
- What applications and types are supported?
- Are systems set up to simplify, secure and optimize virtual machine transfers between the enterprise and the cloud?
- How do they automate or orchestrate management between the enterprise and cloud provider?
- What attributes regarding the end user and application (device, location, role, performance, availability) are incorporated into making intelligent traffic management decisions?
- For all of the questions above, if a provider has a solution, are they different or deficient compared to what the enterprise is already doing? Is the enterprise required to support a different model for each provider?
I'll be blogging more on their latest "vision announcement" tomorrow. Stay tuned.
Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/21/2010 at 12:48 PM