Is your Internet connection ready for the cloud?

 Running your own data center is sooooo 2008! The trend today seems to be to convince companies to make more use of "The Cloud". In the cloud server applications are hosted outside of  the data center and are provided as a service through the Internet.

Well, you know the drill: ASP, SaaS, we heard it all before. In general companies are not planning to move their IT at all. But for some parts using the cloud can be interesting already. Email for instance. Why do you have your own email infrastructure including a server farm, spam protection, backup and power cost, when you can use Google's Gmail or comparable offers for a fraction of the operating costs? Large scale email infrastructures make sense and although email is mission critical to many companies, it is also a commodity just like electricity. Email in the cloud also enables staff to work from home or any other place when services are available globally from the Internet.

To make a long story short: for several applications the cloud can provide a solution and can be a common service provider in the future.  But it makes one component in your infrastructure crucial: your Internet connection! Do you know the availability of your Internet connection? System managers might know, but are they monitored on it? Is it in their KPIs? If the Internet connection fails, is a contingency plan in place? Do you have a redundant Internet connection? Via two separate providers? Are these two providers independent from each other? Via two separate cables? Is failover implemented between these connections? Is this tested regularly?

So....

Many questions  but I guess few answers. So please ask yourself: Is my Internet connection ready for the cloud?