Seven things to consider when choosing a cloud provider

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Cloud solutions undoubtedly bring significant advantages to any business. Selecting the right cloud provider to help with your infrastructure, critical applications and essential business data can be challenging. Take a look at the seven key criteria to help you in assessing a cloud service provider.

1. Certifications and standards

Check whether the cloud service provider complies with the recognized standards and framework. Look for vendors accredited with certifications like ISO/IEC 27001, which details requirements for an information security management system (ISMS) and requires an annual audit for accreditation. Ensure that your cloud service provider adheres to a standard that encompasses structured processes, effective data management, good knowledge management, and service status visibility.

2. Technologies and Support

The Cloud provider’s standards and services must be able to handle your current infrastructure, workload, and operations. Assess how many adjustments would the whole process require and whether a provider offers migration assistance. Support is another parameter that needs careful consideration. Make sure that in case of necessity, you will be able to get help quickly and easily.

3. Manageability

Determine how much time and resources it will take your team to manage various aspects of the cloud infrastructure. If you have services that are particularly vital to your organization, make sure that the cloud service provider you choose offers an easy way to integrate with them.

4. Data security

Check if a cloud provider meets the strict security standards and considers security a top priority. Always verify compliance with standards like the ISO 27000 series and check whether their certificates are valid. Server location is also essential as local legislation might potentially have an impact on the way how your data is stored, processed, and managed.

5. Performance and reliability

To assess reliability, check the provider’s general performance against its SLAs for the 6-12 months. Even if the service provider does not make such information public, they should supply it on demand. Pay attention to how they deal with inevitable downtimes. Ensure that the reporting and monitoring tools can be effectively integrated into your overall reporting and management systems. Check backup, disaster recovery process, integrity checks, restore, data sources, and criticalness of data.

6. Company profile

It is always advisable to choose a cloud service provider with a strong record of stability and no history of a data breach. Check what type of customers they work with and what industries they are experienced in.

7. Service level agreement

Make sure that SLA covers accessibility, service availability, service capacity, response time, and elasticity. SLAs should also specify the ways how issues should be identified and resolved and time frames. They should also include specific compensation and the processes for logging and claiming, and listing terms that limit the scope of the SLA, and list exclusions and caveats.

By meeting the above criteria, cloud service providers will be able to provide enterprise-class services and address your business needs. Hope, you found these tips useful. For more information about cloud services contact our experts.

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