Downtime and security risks were present in each cloud environment tested, according to 2016 Private Cloud Resiliency Benchmarks, a report from Continuity Software.
The study also found that security and performance risks were found in 99 percent and 97 percent of the environments respectively, with 82 percent of the companies facing data loss risks.
Some of the top risks identified across the private cloud environments include:
■ Configuration drifts between cluster nodes that prevent failover. Examples for such discrepancies range from the most trivial – e.g., a file that is not accessible by all hosts in the cluster – to more complex ones – such as incorrect settings of affinity rules.
■ Virtual networking configuration errors leading to virtual machine isolation and downtime. Examples include incorrect Virtual Machine Port Group configurations and resources misalignment between ESXi cluster hosts leading to a single point of failure.
■ Incorrect storage settings leading to corrupt backups and data store loss. Such risks range from invalid CBT configuration to inconsistent LUN numbering and incorrect UUID settings.
What do these private cloud environments look like?
■ 48 percent of the organizations included in the study run their virtual machines on Windows compared to 7 percent of the organizations that run on Linux. 46 percent of the organizations use a mix of operating systems.
■ Close to three quarters (73 percent) of the organizations use EMC data storage systems. Other storage systems used include NetApp (38 percent), IBM (26 percent), HP (24 percent) and Hitachi (18 percent).
■ 27 percent of the organizations use replication for automated offsite data protection.
■ 12 percent of the organizations utilize active-active failover for continuous availability.
■ Almost all of the organizations (96 percent) use more than one physical path to transfer data between the host and the external storage device.
With a growing level of the complexity, increasing interdependence among infrastructure components, and an escalating pace of change, keeping cloud infrastructure free of risky misconfiguration is becoming a challenge that most organizations fail to meet.
"Sooner or later, every system fails," said Gil Hecht, CEO of Continuity Software. "And when a popular service goes down, it doesn't take long for customers to notice."
Each year enterprises continue to encounter downtime, which currently costs an estimated $740,000 per outage according to Ponemon's most recent report.
"The good news is that most risks lurking in the cloud infrastructure can be identified and corrected before they turn into a service disruption," explained Hecht. "This requires a specialized set of processes and tools, but above all a mindset and strategy focused on early detection and the remediation of risks."
The Latest
The journey of maturing observability practices for users entails navigating peaks and valleys. Users have clearly witnessed the maturation of their monitoring capabilities, embraced DevOps practices, and adopted cloud and cloud-native technologies. Notwithstanding that, we witness the gradual increase of the Mean Time To Recovery (MTTR) for production issues year over year ...
Optimizing existing use of cloud is the top initiative — for the seventh year in a row, reported by 62% of respondents in the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report ...
Gartner highlighted four trends impacting cloud, data center and edge infrastructure in 2023, as infrastructure and operations teams pivot to support new technologies and ways of working during a year of economic uncertainty ...
Developers need a tool that can be portable and vendor agnostic, given the advent of microservices. It may be clear an issue is occurring; what may not be clear is if it's part of a distributed system or the app itself. Enter OpenTelemetry, commonly referred to as OTel, an open-source framework that provides a standardized way of collecting and exporting telemetry data (logs, metrics, and traces) from cloud-native software ...
As SLOs grow in popularity their usage is becoming more mature. For example, 82% of respondents intend to increase their use of SLOs, and 96% have mapped SLOs directly to their business operations or already have a plan to, according to The State of Service Level Objectives 2023 from Nobl9 ...
Observability has matured beyond its early adopter position and is now foundational for modern enterprises to achieve full visibility into today's complex technology environments, according to The State of Observability 2023, a report released by Splunk in collaboration with Enterprise Strategy Group ...
Before network engineers even begin the automation process, they tend to start with preconceived notions that oftentimes, if acted upon, can hinder the process. To prevent that from happening, it's important to identify and dispel a few common misconceptions currently out there and how networking teams can overcome them. So, let's address the three most common network automation myths ...
Many IT organizations apply AI/ML and AIOps technology across domains, correlating insights from the various layers of IT infrastructure and operations. However, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA) has observed significant interest in applying these AI technologies narrowly to network management, according to a new research report, titled AI-Driven Networks: Leveling Up Network Management with AI/ML and AIOps ...
When it comes to system outages, AIOps solutions with the right foundation can help reduce the blame game so the right teams can spend valuable time restoring the impacted services rather than improving their MTTI score (mean time to innocence). In fact, much of today's innovation around ChatGPT-style algorithms can be used to significantly improve the triage process and user experience ...
Gartner identified the top 10 data and analytics (D&A) trends for 2023 that can guide D&A leaders to create new sources of value by anticipating change and transforming extreme uncertainty into new business opportunities ...