• Why Cloud?
• Cost Reduction
• Service Level Improvements
• Business Agility
• Secure, Compliant, Efficient IT
• Green IT

Multi-Tenancy - What it Means to You - What you Need to Ask

CloudStrategies' mission is to help clients take fullest possible advantage of the incredible cost savings available from cloud computing, and to do so in a completely secure, private and compliant manner.

One of the primary ways in which cloud computing creates these economies is through sharing of resources, including shared servers, shared storage, even shared applications.  This is similar to having many tenants in a building sharing common space such as hallways, elevators, storage facilities and utilities.  Accordingly, in the cloud computing environment this sharing is referred to as "multi-tenancy."
 

Multi-Tenancy Based on Service Type

The economies available from Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) are derived in large part by virtualizing servers and allowing many clients to share a physical machine that is running multiple instances of a server operating system.    CloudStrategies only works with cloud providers who have demonstrated their ability to manage their virtualization implementation to assure proper segregation, segmentation, and isolation.  This  assures each tenant that their resources are completely protected from other tenants on the same hardware.

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers allow access to their applications by many users from many different organizations.   When CloudStrategies evaluates SaaS providers we look for strong authentication and authorization provisions, security policies that insure controlled access to each users' data, and encryption of the data in storage.
 

Questions We Ask-And You Should Too

Just as you exercise due diligence when making any purchase, you must ask questions of the cloud service providers you intend to contract with.  Ask them how they protect your data in storage, and how they assure that the only people who can access your data are those you approve.  What are their provisions for user authentication and access authorization?  Talk with them about the virtualization systems they use to provide multiple server instances.  How do they go about assuring that each server instance is completely segregated from others on the same physical server device?  Since cloud infrastructure is ever-changing and ever-growing, discuss their use of automation and how it enables them to keep ahead of capacity and configuration changes.

At CloudStrategies, we pride ourselves on partnering closely with our clients in addressing their data management issues utilizing state-of-the-art software and hardware tools.  This gives us peace of mind knowing that our clients have the most current, advanced, and secure data management solutions available.