Ask Before You Leap: Questions for Cloud Providers

There are a million different types of cloud providers and choosing the one that fits your business requires a lot of research. After doing some sleuthing, you should directly ask some direct questions. Virtualization Review blogger Elias Khnaser has six you should start with.

In data centers, data leakage is a huge concern, despite the fact that your own staff is watching over the data. It is that much more of a concern in the cloud where the provider's admins are handling your information.

You need to know exactly how they plan to provide access and audit all the changes.

A related issue is data protection. What is the backup and restore strategy and how long does a restore take?

Single tenant clouds are hugely expensive so chances are your data will reside on the same servers as other clients, sometimes even in the same VM. How does the provider keep all your data safe and separate in shared tenant world?

Lock-in is a big bugaboo. How exactly do you switch to another provider and can you have your data in multiple vendors' clouds?

Finally you'll need a peek at the vendor's books to make sure they'll be around, and get a solid understanding of their service level agreements.

Posted by Doug Barney on 11/27/2012 at 12:47 PM