Business risks associated with private clouds
In general the risks associated with the private clouds are less when compared to the public clouds and the main reasons for this is that, the private clouds are owned by a particular organization and has great control over the several issues like data and security. Apart from the wide range of risks associated with public clouds, there are few identical and considerable risks with the private clouds as well, but the main difference comes across the level of impact on the business.
The level of impact due to the public cloud risks is very high when compared to the private clouds and the different private cloud risks to the business values are reviewed in this section. The risks associated with the private clouds can be categorized at a layered level and in general there are three important layers, where these private risks are identified like the virtual machine layer, the virtual infrastructure layer and the disaster recovery layer. The actual risks associated at these layer is given below
Virtual infrastructure layer
The level of risks associated with the virtual infrastructure layer varies from cloud to cloud, as the private clouds are owned by single organizations and they follow their own implementation of the infrastructure. The common areas where the virtual infrastructure risks are identifies are the storage devices, virtualization servers, virtualization management and the network connecting the devices.
The storage level risks mainly occur due to the reason that, if any of the nodes across the virtualization fails, the other nodes should also suffer with this and thus the overall performance is affected a lot due to the node failures and it may take some time to set back the operations. Virtualization servers also tend to fail and thus the nodes attached to server may fail due to the server failure and also the network connecting the nodes across the cluster also tends to fail due to many reasons and thus the network management risk is also associated with these private clouds at the virtual infrastructure layer.
The virtual machine layer
Virtual machine layer risks are associated with the private clouds and these risks can be considered as the promising risks to be handled by any organization in terms of their business values. Server image, storage allocation and high availability promising are the common issues related to the risks associated with the virtual machine layer across the private clouds. Storage allocation is accessed by different end users across the virtual machines and there could be some data loss problems and due to this the server would become down for some time and that too at the crucial hours of the business. Higher availability of the server also may cause some risks associated with the virtual machine layer.
Disaster recovery layer
Disaster recovery layer risks are most common across the private clouds and in general the disaster recovery mechanism tries to operate above the cloud services and tries to reduce the risk of could failures and data loss across the private clouds. If the disaster recovery layer is associated with some risks, the total operation of the clouds are affected and thus the handling the risks associated with the disaster recovery layer is always a tedious job to the private cloud service providers.
Replication settings are the key areas where the disaster recovery layer fails and if the replication is not done properly, there could be lot of chances where the data is not replicated properly and finally the required database may contain unwanted data across the servers and even the duplicates are generated on a large scale. Storage mapping is the key issues to be covered once the replication settings are handled, the actual usage of the storage mapping comes in to picture when the data is stored on a large scale across the virtual servers .
If the mapping to the storage of the data is associated with some risks, then the ultimate nature of the mapping algorithm against the disaster recovery is affected and thus always a perfect storage mapping should be established across the virtual servers to ensure a perfect and risk free private cloud operations. Recovery management deals with some predefined management techniques to handle the errors and common failures across the clouds. If the recovery management is set to deliver some risks, then the actual operations and services provided by the private cloud are affected a lot and thus always handling the recovery management risks is important than any other risk as discussed till now.
Virtual servers and the clusters in general fail due to many reasons and to eliminated and identify these failures across the large networks, these recovery management techniques are really important and the common risks associated with the recovery management include, mal-functionality of the servers and the nodes across the cluster and they do not respond to the failure mechanism in the failure identification process.
Thus the disaster recovery layer has a wide role to play across the private cloud security and in general as the private clouds are owned by a separate organization, they should take care of their own disaster recovery methodologies and then only should consult the corresponding service providers for the ample quality in their private clouds and also to reduce the corresponding risks as discussed.