Compliance, Security, Availability & Cost Requirements
Compliance, Security, Availability & Cost Requirements
Deploying a virtual machine or hyperconverged environment is only half the job. Every cloud deployment also has to satisfy a set of standing requirements — legal, security, uptime, and financial — that shape which decisions are even on the table.
Compliance Requirements
Businesses must understand and satisfy various compliance requirements. The specific regulations vary by information type, region, and industry. Click each criterion below to expand it.
Security Requirements
All businesses face cybersecurity challenges ranging from denial of service attacks to ransomware to identity theft. Many strategies used to protect on-premises resources also apply to cloud-based content.
Proprietary business information
Your company's internal workings — including data transfers, financial information, and business processes — must be secured.
Intellectual property
The company's proprietary designs and applications require protection from outside exposure to competitors.
Customer privacy
Customers expect protection of names, contact information, purchase history, credit card data, health concerns, and more.
Employee privacy
Employees must also be protected from personal information leaks, phishing attacks, and social engineering.
Availability Requirements
Today's information consumers expect virtually uninterrupted access to services. High availability comes with a cost, which may be justified depending on the resource.
Customers assume on-demand access to web, database, support, and other services. Cloud providers help ensure this using redundancy, scalability, and CDNs to deliver data.
Employees need access to organizational data to drive the business forward. Interruptions prevent employees from doing their jobs, greatly impacting the company.
Microservices and web/database servers often require tight integration that assumes every component is available. Tools like server clusters help ensure this.
Cloud service providers continually update their offerings to maintain cutting-edge technologies — and deprecate features or retire outdated components as necessary. These changes can impact your deployment and management strategies. Utilities such as power and internet access do periodically fail, so disaster recovery and business continuity planning are critical to ensuring availability. Consider redundant methods of accessing resources in the event of an outage anywhere along the chain between employees, customers, and cloud services.
Cost Requirements
Like other aspects of IT, deployment and maintenance costs govern cloud services. What makes cloud computing different is that the cost structures for these services change — rather than purchasing expensive hardware or managing hundreds of licenses, cloud administrators manage resources on an as-needed subscription basis.
Optimization greatly impacts budgeting, allowing businesses to use their resources more efficiently rather than paying for idle capacity.
Resource metering and auditing provide visibility into consumption and use, letting organizations understand exactly how their resources are spent.