10 questions you should be asking your cloud provider
When a business invests in a physical IT infrastructure, it’s common to spend large amounts of time assessing vendors, researching technologies, sourcing and buying hardware or choosing the right hosting or data centre partner. And rightly so. Your business critical data, and that of your customers, needs to be in the safest possible hands.
What isn’t common practice however, is for businesses to use the same approach when it comes to cloud based infrastructures, where — for some reason — decisions are often based purely on price and features.
It’s still the same, critical data. It still needs to be in the safest possible hands, but when it comes to cloud, businesses tend to be more relaxed. The same expectations are there, but the selection criteria seems to be lower.
In reality, businesses should be asking more questions about cloud infrastructures, than they do about physical ones.
In a cloud based environment, there is often less control in terms of choice of hardware and levels of redundancy, and your provider may not have had the same selection criteria as you would have liked — especially if they come in at a low price point. The truth is, most cloud providers don’t have control over the whole stack, and cloud platforms vary enormously.
