Amazon Web Services GovCloud is a great enabler for government agencies and public sector bodies looking to adopt the cloud but still adhere to specific regulatory requirements, compliance issues, and security regulations.
But not all GovCloud experiences are good ones. In many cases, large government organizations and agencies discover their cloud experience is hindered by complex configurations.
Furthermore, managing storage across on-premises and public cloud environments is time consuming and in many cases requires additional training for the storage admins.
Here are five key takeaways to think about when migrating storage to GovCloud for an optimized AWS experience:
When running GovCloud instances, make sure to leverage an ease of implementation combined with scalability and simplified management. This enables GovCloud to be the ideal cloud environment for multiple business requirements such as a disaster recovery site and development and test environments and an alternate location to run and manage applications such as SQL based databases.
Choose a solution that makes the most of your GovCloud resources with advanced storage efficiencies and performance enhancements such as data deduplication, thin provisioning, and compression. This lets you lower the cost of storage while still giving you the cloud economics to grow with your business by purchasing only what you need, when you need it.
Centralize the hybrid cloud management of your cloud and on-premises storage systems. Manage, test, and monitor all your cloud and on-premises storage holistically for obvious time savings. Also, leverage automation capabilities for simplified storage management efforts such as capacity allocation. Let your management environment make storage capacity decisions for you: for example, automatically purchasing new AWS disks when more capacity is required, deleting unused pools of capacity, and moving volumes between data pools as needed.
Although running applications in the cloud can potentially enhance availability and reliability, hybrid applications can also cause availability constraints. When migrating key business applications to GovCloud, make sure your hybrid cloud infrastructure is continuously operational with high-availability (HA) support. HA support makes sure of nondisruptive operation due to redundancy within your storage environment. This eliminates single points of failure for planned or unplanned shutdowns of your storage by having data kept in more than one place.
As you move to the GovCloud region, you now have your data physically located on AWS storage capacity. You can use AWS storage encryption to take advantage of AWS encryption key management services or, if you are looking for a more secure option, a solution that can encrypt your data and manage your encryption keys off site with a third-party key management environment such as KeySecure.
You can try out Cloud Volumes ONTAP today with a 30-day free trial on AWS