What is Cloud Computing?
Cloud is an IT concept whereby computing services are delivered as a managed service from a specialist provider using their shared platform. Cloud computing does not require the purchase of technology, instead, technology is available “on demand” much like electricity or telephone services.
How can Cloud Benefit my Business?
Cloud offers many benefits; first up, it provides immediate and ongoing access to the latest, industry leading, technology without having to continually invest in your own platform. Cloud provides a completely managed infrastructure service, no longer do you need to worry about performing maintenance tasks, patching, updates, and having people “on call” to fix things when they break. You also don’t need to worry about trying to hire, train, and retain IT staff that are proficient in infrastructure management. Cloud also provides a scalable and flexible compute environment, so there is no need to accurately capacity plan, and purchase technology large enough to last several years.
If I use Cloud, does that mean I no longer need my IT team?
Of course not; but rather than having your IT team performing low value maintenance tasks, they can refocus their attention on your business; delivering exceptional application and end user support. They can also spend more time on R&D to help your business find new solutions to their problems.
Will using Cloud save me money?
Generally, yes. Cloud is a completely managed service, so you don’t need to spend money on a datacentre, power, maintenance, tech support, depreciation, and other “draining” costs. Cloud is flexible to accommodate any budget, any requirement, and any scale; it pays to be open with us so the best solution can be proposed to meet your needs.
Do I have to sign any long term contracts to use your services?
Not at all…. In fact one of the core benefits of cloud is that you are free to use (and stop using) technology based on your business needs. We offer discounts for customer that choose to commit to a minimum term (6/12 months), but this is completely optional.
How is your platform comprised, it is based on commodity hardware or traditional “top 5” vendor technology. Why did you make that choice?
Our platform is based on technology from Dell, Cisco, NetApp; We chose these leading brands because they offered the best support in the market, allowing us to be confident in delivering our SLA. Also, these vendors offered the most comprehensive and cost effective solution for our needs.
What is the maximum size Cloud Server I can deploy on your platform?
We can support servers up to 32 CPUs, 256GB RAM, and over 50TB of storage
What is your availability target, and do you offer any formal penalties should you breach your target?
We offer an SLA of 99.9% target, and a 99.5% guaranteed. If we breach our SLA for any reason, we offer service credits of “1 day hosting for every hour your service is unavailable”
What technologies and maintenance procedures have you deployed to ensure you do not breach your target?
Our platform is built in an N+1 manner, meaning that there are no single points of failure. This means we can take technology offline for maintenance, or we can suffer a failure without impacting customer VMs.
We perform robust preventative maintenance procedures, and our support team are KPI’d and incent’d to ensure that “preventable outages” never occur. This means that at all times, someone (or a system) is monitoring the platform and taking preventative/corrective action whenever non-standard events occur.
In addition, for customers that cannot tolerate any downtime, we also have an optional managed DR service. For customers that subscribe, we offer replication to a second facility, whereby we can restore service to VMs in as little as 15 minutes
What performance guarantees do you provide; how can I be sure my VMs will offer a consistent level of performance?
Our SLA includes minimum performance guarantees, including CPU performance, disk performance, network performance, and these are enforced by our platform using hard-set resource reservations. This means the performance of your VMs will always achieve a minimum, and more importantly, predictable, level.
How do you ensure that the performance demands of one customer cannot impact another?
Because we reserve/dedicate resource to each customer, there is no way that one customer can impact another. From a technology perspective, we have IO control software in place that ensures each customer gets their “fair share” of resource as per their allocation.
How do you ensure that your customers are isolated from each other from a network perspective? What technology have you deployed to ensure this?
Our networks are logically segmented using VLANS/PVLANs, and it is impossible for one customer to communicate to another without first being routed through our border firewalls. We also protect every customer with their own virtual firewall (powered by VMware vShield), which provides further fine-grained control of access control lists.
How do you protect me from internet threats; what technology have you deployed to protect me?
We take our internet security very seriously, and have deployed multiple levels of technology to protect our customers against unauthorised access. We have border routers with high level access control lists (blocking known “bad” senders), we have Checkpoint firewalls providing both deep packet inspection firewalling, and also intrusion detection/prevention, and we provide geo-blocks against both China and Russia (with certain trusted IPs from these countries being allowed), and finally, we have (optional) TrendMicro deep security providing “per VM” anti-malware detection and prevention.
What technology have you deployed to help me mitigate the risk of DDoS attacks?
We have seen a rising trend in the use of DDoS as a way to impact customers and damage reputation; we needed to find a robust way to protect not only our own reputation, but that of our customers. To accomplish this, we deployed Radware anti DDoS appliances, which provide a “clean pipe” service, ensuring that only valid traffic passes into our network.
Can I freely run penetration tests against my VMs?
Of course you can. We do request though that you inform us prior as your testing might trigger alarms on our monitoring tools. In fact, we encourage all customers to validate the security of their environment before putting it into production.
What languages does your support team speak?
Our entire team, from sales, engineering, and helpdesk are proficient in Indonesian and English.
What response time do you provide for support requests, and how do you ensure you meet these?
We have an SLA covering our response time, which is set at 15 minutes for high severity issues. We have 24×7 support, which can be reached from any one of seven different means.
What formal escalation process do you have during issues?
We have a well-defined escalation SOP. After pre-determined timeframes (published in our SLA), the call center will escalate to the operations manager, the COO, and finally to the CEO. At any time, any customer is invited to share any concerns with our management team, and their contact details are provided on our contracts.
Should issues arise, are you transparent as to the cause, and do you provide a root cause analysis?
Of course, one of our founding principles is “trustworthy”. We provide you not only with a detailed timeline of events, but also a root cause analysis, and a structured plan on how we will permanently resolve any identified issues so they will not occur again.
How do you protect me against data loss; what techniques have you deployed to ensure you never lose my data?
We provide complementary data snapshots, which are taken every hour, and retained for 24 hours. Should we suffer the failure of a storage subsystem, we are able to recover from a snapshot onto another storage subsystem in our environment. Optionally, we also offer a managed backup service, which provides longer, and offsite retention of critical data.
How is your operations team structured; how can I be sure that only authorized people have the ability to interact with my cloud servers?
Our team is split into three teams; helpdesk, technical support, and engineering. The teams are only allocated the system permissions needed to complete their job. No one person has the ability to copy or delete customer VMs, and once a customer environment has been created (and the customer changes their access password), any access by our staff is blocked.
All privileged system actions are logged, and retained forever in our audit log system. Any customer can request to see the logs for their assigned environment at any time.
Is your cloud platform collocated, or in your own DC? If collocated, how do you ensure physical security; especially when you platform might reside in “common access” areas?
We have two datacentre locations, both of which are in colocation facilities, and both are in Indonesia. The datacenters are professionally managed facilities that have a formal access control system including guards, CCTV, and biometric locks.
What internet bandwidth do you assign for me, and is this dedicated, reserved, or 100% shared?
We provide internet bandwidth under a “fair use” policy, whereby we assign a minimum committed bandwidth, with a substantially higher shared peak. For international traffic, we guarantee 1Mbps (peak 50mbps) and for domestic, we guarantee 100Mbps (peak 1Gbps).
Do your bills vary month by month based on usage, and if so, how can I predict and control my monthly bill (to stop bill shock)?
Cloud is user pays, so you have the ability to alter your monthly bills based on your consumption. However, unlike other providers, IndonesianCloud bill for services IN ADVANCE, so you get to stipulate your monthly invoice before you incur any costs. We never charge customers in excess of their pre-paid invoice.
Should my cloud servers come under a DDoS attack, will I be charged for the bandwidth consumed?
Not at all, we will manage the DDoS attack and mitigate it. You will never be charged outside of your pre-agreed bill.
Has your platform architecture and deployment been based on any published standards, particularly proven reference architectures?
The IndonesianCloud platform is compliant with the VMware vCloud Air Network published reference architecture. This is a global standard that provides customer with absolute assurance that our platform is contracted to the same quality as some of the world’s largest cloud providers.
Where is your platform physically deployed, and how can you ensure me that I will not breach in country “data sovereignty” laws?
IndonesianCloud will only ever operate datacenters in Indonesia. No data will ever leave Indonesia.
What is the ownership structure of your company, it is a local company, or international; if the later, how do you protect my data against international security agencies accessing it (ie do you offer any form of encryption)?
IndonesianCloud is a 100% private, locally owned company. There are no international security laws forcing us to disclose or provide access to customer data.
Am I able to bring my previously purchased software licenses with me to use on your platform, or must I buy all software from you?
Depending on your application vendor, yes. IndonesianCloud is a member of the Microsoft License Portability program, so you are free to use any MS application license on our cloud.
Do you fully support all version of OS’s available for x86 platforms, or do you only offer support for a subset of OS’s and versions?
We support any one of approximately 100 OS variants. This includes all versions of Windows, DOS, Novell Netware, Redhat, Suse, Debian, Ubuntu, and other linux variants.
