Digital Learnings in Sitecore & Cloud

As you may already know, Sitecore v7.5 and above has replaced the SQL Server based DMS technology that it has been using for analytics and replaced it with a new approach that uses the No-SQL technology MongoDB for capturing analytics data. Sitecore has a cloud xDB offering available in some geographies (alas it hasn't come to Australia yet!) but we recently delivered an xDB implementation for a client who needed to house their analytics databases on their local hosting infrastructure. This meant that we had to consider how to meet some of the enterprise requirements with Mongo that we had been pretty comfortable dealing with in DMS with SQL Server.   In particularly our high availability and security requirements had to be addressed slightly differently. This will form the first part in a two-post set outlining some of what we learnt along the way.  The second post deals with configuring Sitecore and MongoDB for enterprise security requirements . High Availability  MongoDB