Cloud Computing - Best Practices To Stay Strong In The Business

1. Cloud Computing - Best Practices To Stay Strong In The Business Placing an important service on the cloud requires monitoring and controls to be installed around the service. “Cloud computing requires governance” Linthicum (2010). As such, author suggests implementing operational monitoring for critical services which may bring down the whole enterprise and may cost company thousands of dollars in lost revenue. As a result, each service needs to be identified with location, dependencies, monitoring, and security. Since the control of what can be monitored, if anything, resides with the cloud computing vendor, organizations need to be aware of that fact at the time of selecting the vendor. Organizations need to have clear perspective on what level of granularity each service requires. Linthicum (2010) suggests defining micro policies for a mission critical, specific service-level governance. Once these policies are defined, policies should be tested and deployed on the cloud environment. Since cloud computing offers some of the “pre-built” functionalities, there maybe existing governance patterns that can be adapted to serve organization’s specific needs.

2. There are numerous governance vendors and some offer run-time monitoring, while others do not; also, some not be able to be integrated on the cloud platform. Once services are identified and policies are defined, it is time to test the governance policies to make sure that they do, indeed, what they are suppose to do. Linthicum (2010) suggests testing governance policies on multiple levels, including user interface, services, governance, and processes. While testing some applications using cloud computing may be complex, organizations must learn how to perform it before disaster strikes. Author suggests white box and black box testing techniques – white box testing (at a programming level ) allows administrators to watch closely what’s going on, while black box testing is invisible while the program operates (at a user level). In addition, testing should be divided into four components: 1. Service-level testing; 2. Process-level testing; 3. Governance-level testing, 4. Information level testing. For Service Oriented Architecture (SOA) testing on the cloud adds two more testing components, namely: 5. Integration level testing; and 6. Security level testing. When testing, each service and sub-service should be tested autonomously, and then together, in a semi-integrated scenario. Make sure to pay close attention needs to testing of the security aspects of the application. Ensuring the application is resilient to possible internet attacks, and does not expose vulnerabilities are the key components of testing for security. Identifying organizational needs for testing their application will reduce the amount of time spent performing the test. Linthicum (2010) presents three major categories: 1. Transactional-heavy; 2. Data-heavy; 3. Process-heavy. Depending on the identified requirements, services need to be tested accordingly. References : Linthicum, D. S. (2010). Cloud Computing and SOA convergence in your enterprise: a step-by-step guide. Upper Saddle River, NJ: Addison-Wesley. CxT Group Michigan,2415 E.Hammond Lake DriveSte,219 BloomfieldHills, MI 48302 Contact No:(248) 282-5599 Toll Free:(877) 439-2539