Capacity Management Important for Private Cloud

Read an interesting article Top tips for calculating the cost of a private cloud. It highlights the importance of capacity management in private cloud.

Accordingly to Dr. Owen Rogers, digital economist at analyst firm 451 Research, one of the most important tasks is to consider how capacity will be added over time, and how much it will cost. However, this is also one of the least considered areas when weighing up the costs involved in moving to a private cloud, he warns.

“A private cloud is ultimately a fixed capacity, and its utilisation will vary depending on the behaviour of its applications and the end-users using it,” he says. “From a cost-efficiency point of view, the best situation is when the entire capacity of the private cloud is utilised, so the unit cost per virtual machine is the smallest.”

It is really surprising to see organizations going ahead without much focus on proper capacity management process or plans as they go ahead with private cloud. But issues arise when they scale up and operations become massive, and that’s when the cost and everything spirals out of control. That is the main reason why organization should first make a proper capacity management plan, look at current capacity and prepare for the capacity that would be required in the future. It is imperative to remember that capacity management is not a stop gap solution but an end-to-end process.

Cloud makes Knowledge Management easy

Knowledge Management is of extreme important for the organization. Gathering, collecting, storing, managing, monitoring and controlling the knowledge data is crucial for an organization’s success. Accessing the appropriate data assumes importance today’s scenario where the speed to market while maintaining the quality defines the success of a product or service. Easy access to those data is the key.

Today collaboration and sharing of knowledge data/content assumes importance. According to a new study by IDG Research, the vast majority of knowledge workers (86%) placed a very high level of importance on collaborating with internal coworkers and external stakeholders, and having access to the most up-to-date corporate information. This kind of collaboration as sharing of knowledge happens only when information can be easily accessed internally and externally. Hence, Cloud-based delivery models are vital as they enable highly scalable document storage and makes seamless collaboration a possibility. Once you store the data in a centralized storage server in cloud, users can easily access, manage, share, view and update the data; in addition, the organization can easily monitor and control those data and used the storage system as a knowledge management storage system enterprise-wise.

Latest Threats to Cloud

CSA (Computer Security Alliance) recently came out with 2013 Top Cloud Computing Security Threats. Cloud security has improved a lot, but threats still lurk; and as the ease to adopt the cloud applications becomes easier, vulnerabilities also increases as organizations might unknowingly expose themselves to malicious threats. Hence, it becomes extremely important for the organizations to keep an eye out for the threats mentioned by CSA. Following are the nine critical threats to cloud security (ranked in order of severity):

1. Data Breaches 
2. Data Loss 
3. Account Hijacking 
4. Insecure APIs 
5. Denial of Service 
6. Malicious Insiders 
7. Abuse of Cloud Services 
8. Insufficient Due Diligence 
9. Shared Technology Issues 

To protect your organization, check out CSA’s best practices guides, “Security Guidance for Critical Areas in Cloud Computing V.3” and “Security as a Service Implementation Guidance.”


The permanent and official location for Cloud Security Alliance Top Threats research is http://www.cloudsecurityalliance.org/topthreats .