Control and management in the cloud

What would a BOFH friendly cloud service look like?


No matter how open minded you are about new delivery models, there’s a bit of the BOFH in everyone involved with IT operations, which kicks in whenever the cloud is discussed. It’s all well and good having someone take a lot of the admin drudgery away, but if this means losing too much control and visibility then you’re quite rightly going to be wary. After all, it doesn’t matter what the SLA says, or even who signed the service provider agreement, if something goes horribly wrong it will be you who has the stress and hassle of picking up the pieces.

Thinking like a BOFH when evaluating cloud service options is therefore not a bad way of approaching due diligence. Will you have the right level of visibility and control? What if you decide to do things differently, whether it’s reconfiguring the environment, or completely switching providers. Then there’s the stuff that business people take for granted, but you need to make sure is done properly – security, backup, DR, ticking the right boxes for the auditors, and so on, never mind ensuring that support works well.

On our recent Regcast, Freeform Dynamics' Tony Lock, iland's Dante Orsini, FUSION's Jeremy Bowman, and Cisco's Simon Herbert, all came together to discuss what all this translates to in terms of specific capabilities and and features. Defining a BOFH friendly cloud service is obviously setting the bar pretty high, but watch our on demand webcast here, and see how close it’s possible to get. You might be surprised at what can be achieved nowadays if you work with the right kind of provider.