While I am a cloud computing advocate the last thing I expect anyone or any business to do is leap into it without careful consideration. I don’t even buy a mobile phone without spending days going over every review so I would not expect any business to make the massive cultural and technological change without spending a lot of the working day – and probably a few sleepless nights as well – researching and planning the move. The problem is that the people who have the resources are generally playing the online utopia card and there are few real road maps for the uninitiated.
Short of water boarding there is no real way of finding out of the supplier is a good bet except to sit down and look at the whites of their eyes! As a starting point here are some of the basic questions in no particular order or importance you should be asking any service provider :
- How stable is the company that owns the infrastructure? How long has it been established? Where does its funding come from?
- Find out about their staff -is there a serious churn with key personnel – how long have people been with the company?
- How well will your data be protected? What provisions does the company make for firewalling the servers and who does the backup of data – you or the service provider? If the latter, how often?
- Who owns your data? Don’t take it for granted you do!
- Is the data centre owned and maintained by the cloud provider or is it co-located in some other company’s facility? For example does the company rent server space from the likes of Amazon’s AWS service?
- What about bandwidth? You need a guarantee that your staff will be able to work without the network grinding to a halt
- Does the provider have geographic redundancy – a method for providing back-up management of a network element in a multi-tiered network management system.
- What happens when the power goes out? Seriously, my biggest fear is what happens when a JCB goes through the wiring! Do they have a UPS or emergency generator and someone on hand to kick start it at 4am!
- What sort of service-level agreements does the provider have?
- What happens to your data if the cloud provider goes out of business?
- Could AUP (Acceptable Use Policy) violations by other customers impact our operations?
- What happens to your data when you scale back usage or cancel our service?
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