Canada Cloud Network Launches Always On Cloud Computing R&D Program

The Canada Cloud Network, an industry forum, this week revealed the launch of its Always On Cloud Computing research and development program. This new initiative is designed to further position Canada as a leader in the global cloud computing sector.

The Always On Cloud Computing initiative provides a next generation data center architecture that leverages replication technologies across multiple data centers to achieve high availability. It has been developed as a reaction to recent downtime incidents from a number of major cloud providers.

The program was also developed as a reaction to the lack of effective service level agreements (SLAs) within the industry. The Canada Cloud Forum believes that despite advances in underlying technologies, operating critical IT infrastructure within a single data center opens up major risks that may potentially endanger customer relationships and lead to business failure.

The Canada Cloud Network was formed through the Cloud Best Practices Network to promote Canada as well as advance industry standards and technologies. The group presented an overview of the new R&D program yesterday via a Meetup event. Technology experts from Canadian companies ThinkOn, ZeroNines and Centrilogic attended and presented an overview of the major focus areas of the new development initiative.

Topics included Disaster Recovery for All - "How to Achieve Enterprise Class Service on an SMB Budget" with Craig McLellan, CEO of ThinkOn. McLellan discussed the state of disaster recovery in the cloud as well as key techniques for building an Always On application infrastructure. ZeroNines CEO Alan Gin focused on high availability healthcare, with the topic of always available architecture for application resiliency across heterogenous clouds, data centers and MSPs.

Robert Offley, CEO of Centrilogic, discussed the benefits of a hybrid hosting architecture.

"CentriLogic offers a multi-zone cross-border cloud hosting solution that is built upon our core infrastructure located within our interconnected data centers in Canada and the USA, meeting customers critical need that their data does not traverse geopolitical borders," Offley explains. "We offer clients the ability to combine their cloud services with their existing hosting environments to ensure a smooth migration of their enterprise-class workloads to the cloud."