According to Gartner prediction on 2013, worldwide IT expenditure on 2013 will top to $3.7 trillion as cloud services become the center of more and more vendor’s hot commodity. As We know, enterprise IT customers will have more variety technology and services in 2013.
As We are in few days before 2013, You or your organization might have started allocating budget for 2013. Before spent your or your organization hard earned money into Cloud Service. Please, by all means to evaluate what is the minimum criteria and what questions do you need to ask potential service provider if You or your organization are evaluating a public cloud?
Through thorough interviews with enterprise IT customers, as well as research on Cloud service providers. We have worked hard to identify the TOP questions businesses should ask when considering your move to the Cloud:
1. Performance and SLA ( Service Level Agreement )
You or your organization should have at least SLA expectation on guaranteed up-time and Disaster Recovery procedural from your future Service Provider offer for your businesses. Including the Performance level and the flexibility to add more resources on demand.
2. Security and Compliance
The next and important factor You or your organization need to worry about is Security of your future Service Provider. Location of your data will be stored, Encryption level, Access Control, Security Audit Complience like ISO27001, SOC 2 or similar regulatory compliance.
3. Support policy
Our next consideration will be the support policy, response time for any issues should your instance go down and the escalation path. On top of that You or your organization should check your future cloud provider dedicated support team, 24 – 7 Support team will be much preferred.
4. Hybrid cloud and Portability
The next important bit especially for established organization who has their own Data Centre. Does your future cloud provider allow you to bring your existing virtual machines into the service? Compatibility level with your existing on-premise infrastructure. Can you easily get your virtual machines out if you need to? Does the service offer a single pane of glass to manage workloads between private and public cloud environments?
5. Pricing and Payment Methods
If your future cloud service provider passed four points above, down to pricing for your last checkpoint. Consider not only the initial cost but the ongoing cost and yearly cost. There will be service provider which will offer You the service pay-as-you-go to start such as Amazon.
We know choosing Cloud Service Provider process can be daunting, however You or your organization must really really consider and weigh the importance of above criteria and evaluate, “finger crossed” hopefully each service provider meets them. You and your organization can reap huge business benefits by adopting a private, public, or hybrid cloud computing strategy, including cost savings, disaster recovery, efficiency, scalability, flexibility and more IF You and your organization can find the Cloud Service Provider which meet above criteria and aligning with your business requirements. Wise men say “Only fool rushed in”
Happy New Year 2013!
Andreas Wasita 