Designing a cloud data system architecture that protects your precious data when operating business-critical applications and workloads in the cloud is of paramount importance to cloud architects today. Ensuring the high-availability for your company’s applications and protecting business data is challenging and somewhat different than in traditional on-premise data centers. For most companies with hundreds to thousands of applications, it’s impractical to build all of these important capabilities into every application’s design architecture. The cloud storage infrastructure typically only provides a subset of what’s required to properly protect business data and applications. So how do you ensure your business data and applications are architected correctly and protected in the cloud? In this webinar, we covered: -Best Practices for protecting business data in the cloud -How To design a protected and highly-available cloud system architecture -Lessons Learned from architecting thousands of cloud system architectures

1. 12 Architectural Requirements for
Protecting Business Data in the Cloud
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

2. 1. High Availability (HA)
• HA should be of critical concern in ensuring data is always available to
applications running in the cloud
• Not all HA solutions and architectures are created equally, so it’s important to
understand differences
• A key aspect to replicated HA is that the data is always available, even in the
face of inevitable failures in underlying hardware systems.
• Make certain your data is located (stored) in more than one zone. These zones
should be located in physically different locations on different hardware
equipment.
• This type of cloud high availability is called: “cross-zone HA” and should be a
company’s top choice for ensuring availability of data to their applications and
workloads.
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

3. High Availability (Cont.)
• DCHA architecture utilizes two systems (CPU, RAM, Network) connected to
the same single set of underlying storage devices
• Provides a way to have greater uptime than just a single compute instance or
VM managing storage in a 1-to-1 configuration
• Less expensive than replicated HA since the storage backend is not doubled
• Ensure that seamless automatic failovers must occur within 30 to 60 seconds
• If not designed correctly, your data sets can become out-of-sync resulting in
corruption or data integrity problems.
• A “Split-Brain” situation indicates that there are data or availability
inconsistencies due to the maintenance of two separate data sets overlapping
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

4. 2. Data Protection
• Snapshots and Rollbacks - snapshots are a form of insurance that
you purchase but hope you never need
• Replication - replicating from:
–an on-premises system to the cloud
–from the cloud to on-premises
–from one cloud platform to another cloud platform
• Mirroring
• Data Efficiency
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

5. Data Protection (Cont.)
• Copy-on-write Filesystem - avoid data integrity risks by not
overwriting data blocks; instead, data changes are always written
to new blocks
• Windows Previous Versions - make sure the solution can make
use of Windows Previous Versions
• RAID
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

6. 3. Data Security and Access Control
• Encryption - data must be encrypted in all phases of its useful
lifespan, which include data transmission, data at-rest and data
in-use
• Authentication and Authorization - LDAP or AD are
recommended as a method for identifying users and groups and
associating data access permissions with them
• Cloud Native IAM Roles - make proper use of cloud native IAM
facilities that protect the data storage infrastructure
• Firewall - Being able to limit access will help reduce the overall
security exposure to your company’s applications and data from
attacks and unauthorized access© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

7. 4. Performance
• Dedicated Storage Infrastructure - Make sure applications and
workloads have all the performance throughputs required
• No Burst Limitations - Some cloud platform vendor solutions use
a “throttling” mechanism to restrain your applications to certain
performance levels
• Predictable Performance Levels - Make sure that any solution
being used in the cloud, on-premises or in a hybrid model
provides consistent and predictable performance levels
• Storage Throughput and IOPS – take storage IOPS and
throughput into consideration
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

8. 5. Flexibility and Usability
• Multi-cloud Platform
• Balance Cost/Performance
• Broad Protocol Support
• Cloud Automation Integration
• Automation
• Cloning for DevOps
• REST APIs
• Software-defined
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

9. 6. Adaptability
• Full spectrum of available Instance / VM sizes and types
• Storage types
• Regional centers
• On-premises and Cloud (Hybrid Cloud)
• Multi-cloud support
• Adaptability to changing requirements
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

10. 7. Data Expansion Capability
• Storage Scaling - If applications and workloads have a large
storage appetite, choose products, technologies or platforms
that scale quickly
• Dynamic Storage Capacity - critical that your design is able to
accommodate the dynamic nature of storage
• Maximum Files and Directories - make sure that all components
of your application / design solution stack are able to use and
store billions of files and directories so your data storage solution
is future-proof
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

11. 8. Support, Testing and Validation
• Support “Safety Net” – Support availability of 24x7x365
• Support Levels – Available through multiple channels (phone,
email, live chat, etc.)
• Design Support – Leverage support from vendors
• Proof of Concept (PoC) - Request a complimentary proof-of-
concept (PoC) trial of a vendor’s product
• Guarantees - ask your vendors what guarantees they offer on
their products
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

12. Support, Testing and Validation (Cont.)
• Troubleshooting - Ask your vendors what help they are able to
provide to you to troubleshoot issues when something happens.
• Monitoring - Ensure vendor’s products support both cloud native
and 3rd party monitoring tools
• Alerts / Alarms
• Uptime Requirements
• Audit Logs
• System Logs
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

13. 10. SLA
• How will the vendors stand behind their offerings?
• Is there a stated SLA provided or when the chips are down will
you be on your own?
• What is the vendor’s guarantee?
• Get a documented guarantee from each vendor that precisely
spells out what is covered, how it’s covered and the remedies for
failure of the vendor’s offering
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

14. 11. Enterprise Readiness
• Petabyte Scale
• Highly Resilient within the Multi-tenant Cloud Environment
• Scales to Billions of Files
• Proven with a Broad Range of Applications and Workloads
• Meets RPO and RTO
• Disaster Recovery (DR) in the Cloud Objectives
• Backup Plan / Strategy
• Reporting and Analytics
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

15. 12. Cloud Native
• Built for the Cloud – were the products designed to run in the
public cloud?
• How easy is it to move legacy applications into the cloud?
• Outline Your Cloud Platform Requirements - Take the time and
actually outline what your company’s requirements are from the
public cloud be:
–Cost savings
–Performance improvements
–Eliminating hardware maintenance fees
–Possibly closing down datacenters
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

16. Accolades and Testimonials
• Positive Product Reviews
• 3rd party Independent Testing / Benchmark Results
• Industry Analyst Proof
• Awards
• Customer / Partner Testimonials
• Trustworthy Vendor
© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.

17. SoftNAS Cloud NAS Overview
© 2017 SoftNAS, Inc.

18. SoftNAS Cloud® NAS
Full-featured, enterprise cloud NAS filer for primary data storage
End-user
Desktops, Devices
Applications
and Servers
Volumes
AFP iSCSI
Storage Pools
Block or Object Storage
CIFS
Private
Cloud
Hybrid
Cloud
Public
Cloud
NFS
NFS
CIFS/SMB
iSCSI
AFP
Use existing
unchanged
applications…
Connect to public cloud
using standard NAS
protocols…
Through hosted compute
instances…
Using various storage
services for flexible capacity
Public / Private Cloud
Platforms Supported
Cloud® NAS

19. SoftNASCloud® NAS
Full spectrum flexibility
$
$$$$
VSA Performance Compute
Flexibility
Data Store Flexibility for Cost
/ Capacity
S3
EBS Magnetic
EBS - General Purpose SSD
EBS - Provisioned IOPS
AWS Storage Options
Cloud® NAS
Volumes
CIFS
AFP
NFS
iSCSI
Cool Blob Storage
Hot Blob Storage
Standard Disk Storage
Premium Disk Storage
Azure Storage Options

20. Technology Partners
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21. Brands You Know Trust SoftNAS

22. Try SoftNAS Cloud Free for 30 Days
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© 2017 SoftNAS®, Inc.