Cloud Administration and Monitoring - A Business Case

Remote Administration and Monitoring

You need a new server?

Think about it, if you buy 1-15 servers, associated maintenance contracts and at least 2 system administrators to make sure you can cover vacation, sickness and holidays you have made a significant investment already in hardware, software, manpower and training. Not to mention the time required to get the servers, installed and configured with the proper software and then train you technical staff as well as the users. As well, if (or should I say 'when') your compute needs grown in the next year like they always do, you now need to buy new servers and provision those and somehow add them to the fold.

A New Breed of Servers is born

So what is the solution to this expensive endeavour? Today, savvy CEO/CTOs are moving their internal infrastructure to the web in the form of cloud computing. One of the most popular services is rackpace cloud servers. In just a few minutes it takes to register your account, you wil have your first server up and running (no waiting and no fuss). The flexibility as well to use multiple server and a load balancer will soon outweigh all the cost of having internal servers to handle all this and the people to maintain it all.

So I don't need any system administrators?

The answer to that is NO. You still need system administration to install your specific software and monitor your cloud servers to ensure optimum capability but you no longer need all that staff on full-time. This is where a new breed of admins is born and I call that cloud administration. For a small charge per hour, these services will log on to your servers/website and perform all the work required and then hop off. You are billed by the hour and therefore your costs are kept under control at all times.

Here are the Key Benefits of using cloud administrators:

High quality system administration services.Part-time or full-time monitoring and administration services.Performance monitoring of the systems.load balancing in various application servers and monitoring the CPU usage of application and database servers.Taking online and offline backups.Scheduling background jobs.

Conclusion

It may be required for you to have internal servers for things like company secrets, but for all other applications you should remember all the costs that you will incur in rent, hardware, salaries and training. If what you need is to get the most out of your budget and out of your IT infrastructure, then a cloud computing and a cloud system administration solution may be the solution for your enterprise.

source: http://EzineArticles.com/6245413