How to Manage an Offshore Private Cloud Installation

Our first installation of a Private Cloud at a USA data centre – Equinix MI6, Miami – has been a roaring success. After some serious planning (and navigating the pandemic-induced supply chain meltdown over the last couple of years), we’ve put our UK clients closer to their US customer base, and improved their international business performance.

Find out more about how to install a Private Cloud in the USA for a UK business

MI6 has opened our UK customers to the US, as well as markets in South America. And this is just the beginning for us. We’ve seen the benefits of international Private Clouds, and our customers are keen on the advantages, too – like lower staffing costs and the ability to form fully remote IT teams.

In the hopefully not-too-distant future, deeserve will be able to install an offshore Private Cloud in any strategically important territory.

But all this begs the question; how do you manage, monitor and administer an offshore Private Cloud installation?

And what happens if something goes wrong?

Using remote IT monitoring

Monitoring your IT infrastructure is the most important thing after design, installation and setup. And it never ends; you’ve always got to be vigilant.

Private Cloud monitoring is no different – but when your hardware is on another continent, the stakes can feel a lot higher. Thanks to remote IT monitoring, even offshore installations can be monitored in real time.

Monitoring your international Private Cloud installation will fall into a handful of categories, but the main ones are:

Security

By far the most important category is security monitoring. Real time security monitoring keeps access to data completely secure at all times. IT and infosec teams use a combination of hardware and software to stay ahead of emerging threats. Security monitoring can also alert you to out of date applications and firmware, helping you patch any and all security holes – and in the event of an attack, you’ll have fast-acting mitigation control.

Performance

How’s the bandwidth? Is the workload straining your Private Cloud resources? Are services readily accessible, at a performance level that meets user expectations? Performance monitoring gives you the answers. Data is collected on the performance of all your IT operations. This is used to give you insight from the data, and help you to better allocate resources for optimum performance.

And at deeserve, we go further. We provide a full-service IT support and monitoring solution that covers security, performance and data centre resource control.

How we do it: deeserve IT monitoring

As well as providing iron-clad security, our dedicated IT monitoring service provides an overview of your whole IT infrastructure – with in-depth and highly granular control when you need it. For offshore Private Cloud installations, this level of control is vital. Let’s run through some of the parameters we can monitor and control completely remotely, with deeserve IT monitoring – plus our security measures.

Server and network monitoring

We can track your Private Cloud in real time, making changes based on current needs. For example, we can analyse disk usage, CPU performance, memory usage, network throughput, uptime – and allocate resources during peak demand times.

Because monitoring happens in real time, response can be immediate. But the data is logged over time too, and we can analyse trend patterns to automate resource allocation or suggest beneficial upgrades to your Private Cloud.

For security, we use VPNs (Virtual Private Networks) for secure access – for us and for users – to and from the Private Cloud. We also use hardware firewall monitoring for full control of incoming traffic, and antivirus monitoring to scan all incoming data.

Our IT support service includes strict monthly patching plans, to ensure infrastructure is always up to date.

These measures ensure rock-solid performance and the tightest security possible from a remote installation.

Data centre resources

As well as being able to monitor your own hardware, we have access to data centre resources, too. We can monitor the cabinet state – like whether the door is opened or closed, for an extra layer of physical security. We can also monitor temperature and humidity, to maintain performance and prevent hardware failures.

Speaking of hardware failures…

Uh oh. Something bad happened

What happens if there’s a total outage at the data centre? Well, that’s an all too real risk…

Our Private Cloud installs are generally highly resilient, and extremely quick to recover. Take our installations at MI6, as an example. While it hasn’t yet been officially certified, the N+1 power and N+2 cooling redundancies place it between a tier 3 and tier 4 data centre.

Learn more about data centre tiers.

This means average uptimes of between 99.982% and 99.995% per year can be expected from the underlying infrastructure.

But data centres like MI6 have another killer feature; on-site management and security. The data centre is staffed 24/7, 365 days a year – with highly skilled security personnel as well as IT professionals.

We’ve got a case going on currently; a hard drive has failed in one of our servers, so we’re currently working to get it replaced. Hardware failures aren’t totally unexpected – nothing lasts forever, after all. But by having diligent IT monitoring, on-site presence and a robust backup strategy, this isn’t as big a deal as it might seem.

So, even if the absolute worst were to happen, your international business operations would be protected, despite being an ocean away from you.

Of course, you’ll still need to design, install, and monitor your offshore Private Cloud installation. Unless you choose deeserve to manage it all for you…

International IT infrastructure, made effortless

deeserve’s managed IT provides full-service support for offshore Private Cloud installations.

We won’t just design and implement your international Private Cloud infrastructure – we’ll monitor and administer it, too. With data centre staff on-site, and your dedicated team at deeserve working around the clock, you’ll always have support available no matter where you are in the world.

It’s international IT, made effortless.

Interested? Just call us on 01509 80 85 86 (+44 1509 80 85 86 from the USA and internationally) or send your message to [email protected].

Posted on: 9th May 2023.