Cloud Computing for Continuity of Operations (COOP)

The Endpoint Imperative: Global Security Compliance. Are you ready?

By G C Network | November 12, 2017

    China has its Cybersecurity Law. Next May, the General Data Protection Regulation – or GDPR –goes into effect for the European Union. Research shows most organizations just aren’t…

The Endpoint Imperative: IT Spending: Setting Priorities in a Volatile World

By G C Network | November 5, 2017

  Fast-evolving trends are changing the way IT thinks about security. To stay secure and productive, IT operations must excel at the fundamentals: PC refreshes for security, and optimizing end-user…

Top 1000 Tech Bloggers

By G C Network | October 24, 2017

The Rise “Top 1000 Tech Bloggers” leaderboard recognizes the most inspiring Tech journalists and bloggers active on social media. They use Klout scores (50%) and the blogger’s twitter conversations on…

IBM – The Power of Cloud Brokerage

By G C Network | October 14, 2017

Hybrid cloud adoption is now mainstream and you are making decisions every day about how to transform application and infrastructure architectures, service delivery, DevOps, production operations and governance. With Cloud…

More SMB Love Needed

By G C Network | September 29, 2017

    In a recent post, titled “10 Surprising Facts About Cloud Computing and What It Really Is”, Zac Johnson highlighted some interesting facts about cloud computing in the SMB…

ATMs Are IT Too!

By G C Network | September 5, 2017

That world of homogenous IT technology managed entirely by the internal IT organization has long disappeared.  Operations today require efficient and global management of technologically heterogeneous environments. The challenges and…

Digital Transformation Asset Management

By G C Network | August 30, 2017

Today’s businesses run in the virtual world. From virtual machines to chatbots to Bitcoin, physical has become last century’s modus operandi.  Dealing with this type of change in business even…

The Game of Clouds 2017

By G C Network | July 30, 2017

The AWS Marketplace is growing at breakneck speed, with 40% more listings than last year! This and more insights were revealed when CloudEndure used their custom tool to quickly scan the…

Managing Your Hybrid Cloud

By G C Network | July 14, 2017

Photo credit: Shutterstock   Runaway cloud computing cost may be causing an information technology industry crisis.  Expanding requirements, extended transition schedules and misleading marketplace hype have made “Transformation” a dirty word. …

American Airlines Adopts Public Cloud Computing

By G C Network | June 30, 2017

Did you know that the reservations systems of the biggest carriers mostly run on a specialized IBM operating system known as Transaction Processing Facility (TPF). Designed by IBM in the…

Recently, I’ve been focusing on cloud computing for COOP. The way I looked at it, many government agencies are already using commercial shared facilities as COOP sites and that the cloud simply represented a virtual shared facility. Although there are still many security, privacy and policy issues that need to be addressed, it seems to me that cloud computing could still provide a cost effective and efficient COOP capability for certain operational and mission subsets.

A major key to success would be in the identification of which non-critical applications and infrastructure resources an agency could migrate to a cloud platform. By definition, these would be resources the agency could go without for two days. In general, applications, storage and server resources related to ad-hoc projects, research and development efforts, and certain peak-time requirements could clearly be considered.

To ensure operational and contractual flexibility, only solutions that could work across multiple cloud infrastructures should be considered. Many commercial vendors can provide multi-cloud support for continuity of operations requirements, including:

After appropriate technical and cost/benefit trades, vendors could be selected and SLAs negotiated. Pending agencies policy reviews and appropriate contracting vehicles, cloud-based COOP could then be put in place.

Is this a valid approach? Are their alternatives? As always, your suggestions and recommendations are welcomed.

Follow me at https://Twitter.com/Kevin_Jackson

G C Network