At any medium to large-sized business, there is often a mix of private and public clouds and multiple service providers. All organizations need a good way to manage the interconnections and dependencies within their cloud infrastructures.  This is where orchestration comes in.

What is Cloud Orchestration?

Cloud orchestration uses code to automatically provision resources and services in a cloud environment. Orchestration takes a series of separate automated tasks and coordinates them within a workflow. The premise is that managed, controlled automation is more efficient than keeping automated tasks siloed and unmanaged, which can create confusion.

More specifically, the tasks within an orchestration workflow in cloud computing can involve the following:

• Starting or provisioning new servers
• Adding extra storage capacity
• Spinning up new virtual machine instances
• Accessing cloud-based software services

Benefits of Cloud Orchestration

There are several reasons beyond greater efficiency that businesses might want to consider cloud orchestration, including:

• Auditing cloud use

With a complex multi-cloud setup, it’s difficult for IT support teams to maintain visibility and control over cloud use on their own. Orchestration provides a unified view of cloud resources, which facilitates better monitoring. The result is increased control of your cloud environment and improved implementation of IT security policies and cloud usage guidelines.

• Reduced costs

An additional benefit stemming from how orchestration enables visibility is more economic use of cloud resources. Unused servers are quickly identified and automatically switched off, which avoids unnecessary expenses. Network admins can maintain control of the virtual machines on their network. Coordinated automation generally requires less human labor and consumes only the necessary resources for the company’s cloud workloads, both of which save money.

• Simplified automation

Automation on its own is useful, but it can introduce complexities. Because automation handles individual tasks, it can lead to confusion about what needs automating and when. With orchestration, everything is integrated into a unified workflow, leading to greater clarity and simplicity.

• Event-driven remediation

When any company uses the cloud, things are bound to go wrong now and then. Disks may run out of space for your primary storage, not enough servers might be provisioned to deal with traffic spikes on business applications. One of the great things about orchestration is its ability to provide organizations with event-driven remediation. If a disk runs out of space, new storage space is automatically provisioned via the orchestration tool(s).

• Improved agility

Modern IT businesses need to be agile, which means they need to be able to rapidly respond to change. A business is only as agile as its IT infrastructure, though. Orchestration is hugely important for achieving improved agility through the intelligent and automatic provisioning of resources across storage, computing, and networking cloud infrastructure.

Popular Cloud Orchestration Tools

There is a slew of cloud orchestration tools available to businesses. Some are orchestration-specific; others facilitate orchestration through IT task automation. Here are some examples:

• Bolt
• Morpheus
• IBM Cloud Orchestrator
• AWS CloudFormation
• Ansible
• Puppet

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Data Replication in the Cloud

In the context of cloud computing, data replication is vital for businesses that want to ensure data redundancy. The last thing you need is your primary storage server for a business-critical application going offline, affecting end users. With effective data replication in place, the end-users will never notice if a primary storage system goes down.

It’s important for IT departments to note that data replication in the cloud can be instigated by two different parties:

1. Cloud service providers. As part of a cloud provider’s service level agreement (SLA), each provider typically replicates data automatically at no cost to you; the business using their cloud services. But you also have no control over this replication.
2. Users of cloud services. As a business user of cloud services, you can take action to replicate your data or other important resources if you want added protection beyond what your cloud provider does. Or, as you’ll soon see, if you want a different type of replication.

It’s worth noting that replication is a disaster recovery strategy. In the event of a disaster causing the failure of a primary system, replication provides failover to a secondary system.

The scope of replication does not extend to data corruption or deleting data. If there is a fundamental problem that affects a dataset, such as accidental deletion, the problem is simply replicated to your secondary systems.

From this perspective, data replication is a tool with an important role to play in your wider business continuity strategy and disaster recovery plan.

Synchronous vs Asynchronous Replication

If you want to take action to replicate your data and important cloud resources aside from what your cloud provider does, you need to know about the different types of replication. By understanding these ways to replicate data, you can choose the best method for your use cases.

Synchronous replication happens in real-time. As you write data to your primary storage, it gets replicated to other secondary locations simultaneously. With synchronous replication, data is written to multiple locations all at the same time.

Asynchronous replication is when data is not replicated in real-time. The data is written to the primary storage location, and there is a time lag between the initial write and the copying of this data from primary to secondary sources.

By definition, each of these types of data replication in the cloud comes with its own advantages and disadvantages.

Synchronous replication is useful precisely because it happens in real-time without any delay. There is no risk of data loss caused by the failure of the primary resource between the time of writing and the time of replicating.

The disadvantage of synchronous replication is that it is highly limited by distance. Any sort of network latency above 30-40 ms between two storage locations is not conducive to effective synchronous replication. As such, this type of replication is typically only suitable within a data center or between two locations close to each other geographically.

Asynchronous replication is not limited by geographic location. You don’t need pristine network connectivity and as much bandwidth to replicate asynchronously.

The problem with asynchronous replication is that if a disaster strikes the primary data resource during a period of heavy updates with lots of write operations, these updates will not be reflected when the replication occurs.

In Closing

The main question you need to answer as a business is, “Which type of replication is better”? The answer depends on the specific priorities and budget at your company’s disposal.

In general, you should choose asynchronous replication when you want a more cost-efficient solution with minimal network burden and long-distance replication.

Your business should use synchronous replication if you can’t tolerate any level of data loss and your secondary storage locations are in close proximity, such as in your own data center.

Lastly, always remember to monitor your cloud usage, making sure that data is actually being replicated how you want it to be.

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Benefits of Cloud Monitoring

When IT departments deploy cloud resources, they often do so in an automated way. The problem is that not keeping track of these resources potentially leads to situations in which servers are left running that aren’t doing anything. Another bad outcome from a lack of visibility into cloud usage is that applications might need more resources than are currently in use, leading to performance issues or downtime.

Cloud monitoring tools and dashboards can keep track of storage usage, memory consumption, billing costs, and currently running servers. Correspondingly, the main benefits of cloud monitoring are:

• Cost-effective—cloud monitoring keeps your bill as low as it can be. Despite the often touted cost-efficacy of using cloud computing, it can quickly become an expensive mistake for your business if the proper monitoring is not in place or used.
• Reliability—whether you use the cloud for internal or customer-facing applications, monitoring your resources ensures reliable application performance, with the appropriate number of servers and amount of storage in place to meet application demands.
• Scalability—proper monitoring ensures you can scale your resources up or down on an as-needed basis, precisely when demand for resources dictates that you need to scale.
• Investigative—by examining log files, your cloud monitoring efforts can unearth insights into potential threats to databases, or other issues affecting your IT infrastructure.

Cloud Monitoring and Alerting

Alerts are a hugely important part of effective cloud monitoring. Typically, the way in which cloud alerting works is that when a specific threshold is reached on a resource, the monitoring tool or dashboard generates an alert.

It’s crucial to note that generating an alert doesn’t necessarily mean your IT department receives a notification about it. Ideally, you want a monitoring solution in place with as much automation as possible. What this means in practice is that you set up alerts and automated corrective actions for those alerts.

The idea is that you have a workflow in place that readily detects suboptimal performance and has automated actions to take the relevant systems or applications back into an optimal state of performance.

For some alerts, you will want explicit notification by email or text. These alerts typically relate to billing considerations. With a certain cloud budget in place, you’ll want to know exactly when and why your organization’s cloud usage exceeds that budgets

Scaling Cloud Resources

Scaling your cloud resources in an automated or manual way as needed is a huge part of the reasoning behind cloud monitoring. The beauty of the cloud is that resources are practically unlimited, and you can spin up a new server in minutes if you need to.

It’s important to remember, though, that you can also scale your resources down. Cloud providers would love your business to spin up servers, leave them running, and forget about them. This lack of monitoring leads to more money in their pockets. But it serves your business no useful purpose to pay for unused resources, which is why monitoring is so crucial.

You can generally scale in the cloud in two types of ways. Vertical scaling is when you add more computing power to resources you’ve already deployed. For example, you could add more storage or processing speed. Horizontal scaling is adding extra resources to your current cloud infrastructure.

Cloud Monitoring Tools

Most leading cloud providers give you some useful tools for tracking and monitoring your cloud use. Google‘s Cloud Monitoring suite is a good example.

Closing Thoughts

Striving for as much automation as possible is a prudent way to go about cloud monitoring. Try to get a tool that facilitates automation and gives central access to and control over your entire cloud deployment across all providers and types of cloud. To really optimize cloud performance, incorporate user feedback metrics, such as response times, into your monitoring capabilities.

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What is Load Balancing?

Load balancing distributes workloads on a network across multiple servers efficiently. With load balancing in place, no single server becomes overburdened by network traffic, ensuring that end-users, whether internal or external, experience stable performance when interacting with IT services, such as applications or websites.

Software Load Balancer vs Hardware

Load balancing can function using software or hardware. Companies can purchase a proprietary load balancing device pre-loaded with a special operating system. The device’s operating system distributes traffic in an efficient way across many servers.

For software-based load balancing, no proprietary hardware is required. You can simply install the software on a standard server, from which the load balancing software manages the traffic flow. The server can be on-premise or a virtual machine.

It’s the network administrator’s role to properly set up load balancing. The network admin defines an IP address or DNS for the website, application, or task for which an organization needs load balancing. This IP address ensures that all traffic for the specific function goes to the load balancer.

From the load balancing server or load balancing device, the traffic is distributed using the IP addresses of the actual servers that will handle and share the workload(s) in question.

Different types of load balancing algoirthms control the flow of traffic to servers. It’s the job of the network admin to choose the most suitable algorithm based on their own knowledge.

Load Balancing Options

There are a few different types of configurations and options for using load balancing in networking. This section doesn’t attempt to be exhaustive—rather, it provides a high-level overview of topics that could have entire posts dedicated to them.

1. On-premise load balancing: typically for large organizations that want to manage traffic flow on a network from internal applications with heavy use, such as CRM systems.
2. Internet-facing load balancing: companies can distribute incoming Internet traffic (to their website, for example) efficiently between many servers.
3. Cloud load balancing: distributes workloads across many computing resources in the cloud and on-premise using a service-based model.
4. Content-based load balancing: an approach to load balancing in which different groups of servers handle different types of requests, such as video streaming, downloads, and web pages.
5. Global server load balancing: distributes traffic across server resources located in multiple regions around the world.

Benefits of Load Balancing

Given the definition of load balancing, it would be easy to assume that network efficiency is the only important benefit. However, the picture is bigger than that, and IT departments at small, medium, and large businesses have much to gain from using load balancing.

Scalability

One of the best benefits of load balancing that accommodates offloading traffic to the cloud is scalability. Maybe you’re a small consumer goods business selling merchandise online and your web servers can handle your online store traffic most of the time. But, during specific times of the year, such as Black Friday, you experience traffic surges and your servers become overburdened, leading to failure.

Load balancing addresses this exact need for scalable computing resources. By using load balancing, you can offload traffic to the cloud during times of peak demand, whether that means for specific days during the year of specific times. Read about different ways to connect to the cloud.

Redundancy

In the case of a small, fast-growing business, there is a need to expand beyond using a single server to deliver customer-facing websites or use business-critical applications. A single point of failure can cost your business a lot of money.

However, even if a business has multiple web servers, it’s possible for a server to fail. Without load balancing in place, all the requests made to the failed server cannot be answered, which affects the end users. With load balancing in place, you achieve redundancy. Traffic is automatically redirected to working servers, meaning your critical applications and websites aren’t noticeably impacted by the failure of one server.

DDoS Mitigation

One of the most overlooked benefits of load balancing in networking is in the area of network security. Using a software-based load balancer with the option to offload traffic to the public cloud provides cost-effective protection against DDoS attacks.

In a DDoS attack, a third party attempts to overwhelm IT resources by inundating an organization’s servers with a barrage of requests to the point that they stop working. From a business continuity perspective, DDoS attacks can be incredibly damaging. The use of load balancing is cost-effective and elastic in mitigating DDoS attacks. Software-based solutions with intelligent analytics can offload large numbers of server requests to public cloud servers when DDoS attacks are identified.

Performance

Your business-critical apps and websites work better with load balancing in place. Downtime is dramatically reduced. Content-based load balancing ensures servers are optimized to deal with specific types of requests, resulting in further performance boosts.

Reliability

With global server load balancing, or even cross-regional load balancing, you become less susceptible to conditions in one area and your critical apps become more reliable. For example, say you’re a small marketing company from Heuston hosting a business-critical application, and your employees work remotely. If there’s a severe weather event or power outage in Houston, all your servers go down, and nobody can access the business-critical app. With load balancing, different servers in different geographical areas can host the application and the load balancer can direct end user requests to these servers.

Summary

Load balancing can benefit businesses of all sizes by managing the distribution of workloads between servers. A load balancing solution, whether software or hardware-based, should be a prime consideration of any company’s IT department and network administrator.

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Connecting to The Cloud

How your organization actually connects to the cloud has a significant impact on your company’s cloud workloads, on security, and on your networking configuration. Here are the five main choices. It is worth noting that you can combine different ways of connecting to the cloud depending on your needs.

Web Browser

The easiest and most popular way to connect to the cloud is through a secure web browser connection (HTTPS). Web browsers enable single clients (users) to securely connect to cloud services over the Internet. Because HTTPS is a secure communications protocol, it encrypts any data, such as usernames and passwords, sent over the Internet.

Connecting to the cloud with a web browser is very useful for organizations that want to benefit from the anytime, anywhere access that the cloud promises. Desktops, laptops, and tablets all come with web browsers. Companies offering remote work or WFH policies will find this cloud connection method particularly useful.

VPN

A VPN adds an additional security layer on top of connecting to cloud services via the Internet. The use of web browsers with HTTPS provides one layer of encryption—adding a VPN to the equation gives you two layers of encryption, which is more secure for any business.

It’s worth remembering that attacks on cryptographic algorithms do happen. With a VPN, it is much more difficult to carry out sophisticated encryption attacks by virtue of having two layers of protection. A VPN is essentially a private connection that occurs through a public network (the Internet is a public network).

It’s also worth bearing in mind that with remote work becoming more popular, endpoint security is a greater concern than ever. While web browser access is fine for individuals wanting to use cloud services, companies really need to consider VPNs.

An additional benefit of a VPN for businesses connecting to the cloud is that many organizations use several computing resources spread out geographically that need to communicate with each other. A VPN helps to secure the traffic between these different clouds.

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Direct Dedicated Connections

For businesses and large enterprises needing persistent cloud connectivity and large data transfers, it’s possible to get a direct dedicated connection between the corporate network or data center and the cloud service provider. This connection is private and can provide better performance than Internet-based connectivity.

High uptime guarantees and better cost-efficiency are additional attractions of a direct connection. Most leading cloud providers offer elastic connections, meaning you can easily provision faster or more connections between your corporate network and the cloud provider.

Secure Shell

Secure Shell (SSH) facilitates connections to Linux cloud instances using the command line SSH client on a computer. SSH is a cryptographic protocol, and as such, it enables secure connections to cloud resources (and other computing resources) over unsecured networks, such as the Internet.

Command prompts can introduce technical complexities that employees might find confusing, but SSH is still worth using if secure, encrypted connections are needed to Linux cloud servers. If the desktop workstations at your company don’t have a dedicated SSH client installed on them, you can get PuTTY or OpenSSH for free.

The main use case for SSH is if your company uses cloud services to spin up Linux instances in the cloud and needs to connect to these instances. Reasons for provisioning a virtual Linux instance include testing software on different operating systems or testing changes to network configurations without affecting production environments.

Remote Desktop Protocol

In the context of cloud computing, remote desktop protocol (RDP) enables cloud users to access Windows server virtual machines provisioned on cloud services such as AWS EC2. Remote desktop protocol essentially achieves the same purpose as SSH except that the virtual machine being accessed runs on Windows rather than Linux.

To use remote desktop protocol from a client machine running on Windows, you can use the default client service, which is known as Remote Desktop Connection. Mac users can access Windows cloud instances with Microsoft remote Desktop for Mac. Linux users can simply use the rdesktop client.

Conclusion

That is a summary of the five main ways of connecting to the cloud. For remote work, a VPN is definitely crucial. These connections methods can be combined depending on how well each one fits your company’s security posture, IT budget, and cloud use cases.

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But the underlying technical details are just as important for IT decision-makers to be aware of as these higher-level benefits. There are different cloud storage types that suit different use cases—this article explains them clearly to help your company make a more informed choice about cloud storage.

How Does Cloud Storage Work?

Cloud storage, on a hardware level, works similarly to any traditional hard disk storage method. Physical hard drives store information—most cloud storage providers have hundreds of thousands or even millions of such storage drives.  Servers control access to information stored in the cloud, and users with the right access credentials can access the stored information.

The big difference between on-premise storage and cloud storage is that the maximum storage space is far larger in the cloud. An on-premise computer housed in a data center with six hard drive connectors has a maximum storage capacity of six hard drives. In the cloud, there’s a separation of logical and physical storage, so that one logical storage unit can have thousands of hard drives. This separation of physical and logical storage is known as software-defined storage.

Software-defined storage technology is what drives most of the cloud storage benefits, such as scalability and lower costs. Even though the cloud user ultimately remains unaware of this type of technology, it’s still interesting to know what’s going on behind the scenes.

What to Look for in a Cloud Storage Service

As a business, your choice of cloud storage service is not a trivial decision. It would be quite an expensive experiment to choose one vendor only to find that they don’t support a certain use case, their service is too costly, or their service is not up to your organization’s standards. With that in mind, here are some crucial metrics and questions to consider when procuring a cloud storage service:

• Is the data encrypted? (see tips on cloud security for businesses)
• Does the vendor offer intelligent storage analysis and optimization?
• What is the cost per gigabyte?
• What is the latency for reading and writing operations?
• Is storage compression used?
• What are the storage capacity limits?

Hot vs Cold Storage

When evaluating cloud storage services, it’s crucial to identify whether you need hot or cold storage. Hot and cold storage are the two main categories of performance you’ll often see in cloud vendor services.

Hot storage makes information instantly accessible and acts as a direct replacement for hard drive space in a traditional data center. The focus of hot storage is on speed and high frequency of access, which makes for a higher cost per gigabyte. Cold storage is used for long-term archival storage and infrequently access data, so it costs less per gigabyte.

Cloud Storage Types

The cloud storage type refers to the particular way in which information is stored and retrieved from the vendor’s storage media. The logical configuration of 0s and 1s—how they’re organized—can make a big difference to performance. It’s crucial you know about these cloud storage types and choose a cloud vendor that offers what you need.

Block Storage

Block storage splits files into chunks of data of equal sizes. Each data chunk has a unique address on the hard drive. Because files are split into chunks, it’s possible to modify parts of files in block storage without needing to read or open the entire file.

Block storage should be favored by any IT department that cares about performance for large, structured databases and frequently accessed data. Structured data is organized data that is stored within a fixed field within a file. For example, a relational database might contain inventory data stored in rows and columns. Spreadsheets are also structured.

If you opt for hot cloud storage for a relational database application, block storage will give you the performance you need. Other use cases include storage area networks in enterprise data centers and email server software.

File Storage

File storage assigns a hierarchical structure to files and organizes them into folders on a hard drive. Pretty much every Windows user is familiar with the below screenshot, which is representative of a file storage structure.

File storage is useful up to a point. But when the number of files becomes large, or the file sizes are huge, file storage structures become very inefficient. The best business use cases for file storage are for employees wanting to store and access files on their workstations and for teams of employees wanting to share a small number of important files about a project.

Object Storage

Object storage stores data files as objects and couples this stored data with information about the data that makes it easier to find. The structure for object storage is a flat structure with no hierarchy. There are also no set limits on the object sizes.

Object storage solves the problem of efficiently storing unstructured data. Unstructured data, such as pictures and videos, don’t fit into a defined data model or easily fit into a defined structure. The way to efficiently store and retrieve unstructured data is to maximize the information about that data. This information is known as metadata, and it doesn’t exist in object storage.

Object storage is great for storing unstructured data that might form the bulk of an enterprise’s content marketing materials—think product images, videos, PDF files, infographics, etc. Object storage is also a good option for backing up archived data that is not accessed frequently.

Conclusion

It’s clear that IT decision-makers need to understand the types of cloud storage before making a commitment to invest in a particular service provider’s solutions. Ideally, you’ll have a cloud strategy with clearly defined storage objectives. Your organization can use the information above to find a cloud vendor that meets these objectives with the best mix of cost and performance.

If you enjoyed this article and you’d like me to write an engaging, well-researched article or blog post for your business on any technical IT topic, you can email me now by clicking the below button:

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When you store data or run applications in the cloud, your business is essentially renting computing infrastructure from a cloud vendor. You access the infrastructure through either the Internet or a private network connection. A cloud service provider could have watertight security, but if there’s a lapse or error in your own security processes, there’s a good chance you’ll lose data or get hacked.

This article provides actionable tips for safe cloud storage and more robust cloud security for businesses.  Areas covered include encryption, security configurations, account credentials, and replication.

Tips for Safe Cloud Storage

It’s imperative you keep your sensitive business data secure when using cloud services. You need to secure data as it moves to the cloud (data in transit) and when it’s at rest in the cloud.

Safe cloud storage deserves its own section because backing up data to the cloud is one of the most common use cases of cloud services. Furthermore, most of the major cloud security breaches that make news headlines happen in cloud storage services.

Most reputable cloud vendors provide strong storage controls when the data is already in their systems. However, bear in mind that you can still be vulnerable to data breaches to data at rest in the cloud resulting from poor access controls or bad cloud configuration. A number of high-profile cloud security incidents have occurred because of companies leaving entire buckets of sensitive data open and unencrypted.

Two tenets of cloud data security are confidentiality and integrity.

Encryption is the main method used to achieve data confidentiality. Sending unencrypted files across a network or storing data unencrypted is a recipe for a third party to intercept and/or access the data. Encryption changes the data so that only those with access to a secret key can read the data.

Data is less secure when it’s moving, such as when you’re sending information from on-premise systems to cloud storage services. Encryption needs to be enforced for data in transit using secure network protocols and the latest cryptography standards. You also need to manually enable default encryption for data at rest in cloud services like Amazon S3 to avoid costly and embarrassing data breaches.

Data integrity is all about whether you can trust the data. Digital signatures can be used to ensure data integrity. A digital signature is essentially a stamp that verifies the authenticity of information sent over a network. There are several digital signature services, such as SignNow, that can integrate with your cloud workflow and ensure data integrity on cloud systems.

When using public cloud services, which are normally accessed over the Internet, consider switching to a  dedicated VPN network that lets you securely and privately connect your enterprise network directly to the cloud provider’s network.

5 Best Practices for Cloud Security

1. Proper Account Access Controls

Proper account access controls should include disabling or removing unused accounts. Default cloud accounts used for initially provisioning a cloud service should be deactivated because seasoned cybercriminals typically know the usernames for these accounts. If they know the username, they already have 50% of the information needed to log in to the cloud service.

2. Use the Least Privilege Principle

Another cornerstone of prudent account access controls in the cloud is being aware of the risk from employees unintentionally deleting data they shouldn’t have access to. The principle of least privileges only gives each employee access to the data and resources needed to carry out their duties. The point of using the least privilege principle is to avoid incidents in which someone internally to the organization compromises the privacy or integrity of data.

3. Automate Cloud Security

Automation helps your organization become much more efficient in its cloud security. With the number of cloud services used by companies continuing to grow and the environments becoming more complex, it quickly becomes impractical and even dangerous to do everything manually.

Cloud security automation uses scripting and tools to perform repetitive tasks automatically and on-schedule. Using automation frees up resources, enabling security professionals to focus more on proactive defense measures. Examples of cloud security tasks you can automate are:

• Disabling accounts
• Cleaning up security settings for virtual machines
• Setting up alert severity levels for cloud security tools
• Monitoring configuration files to detect user privilege escalations

4. Segregate Duties

Segregating duties in the context of cloud security means dividing the responsibility for sensitive tasks among two or more individuals. The point of segregating duties for such tasks is to implement internal controls that prevent one person from compromising sensitive data or disrupting business-critical applications. For example, don’t have the same person in charge of multiple aspects of your cloud security administration, such as configuring accounts and security alerts.

5. Defend Against Availability Attacks

Data isn’t the only important business asset at risk in the cloud. A number of types of cyber attacks target the availability of critical business applications and operations, such as company websites.

DDoS attacks are the most well-known availability attacks. Subtypes of DDoS attacks include ping of death and ping flood attacks. You should definitely consider using a cloud DDoS protection solution, such as Cloudflare to defend against availability attacks.

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