Enterprise-Ready? 10 Questions For Your Cloud Provider

F5 Networks is a pretty cool company. Anybody who offers a solution that maintains a user connection to a VM moved half way around the world would at least seem to have the mobility thing working for them, which puts them on top of the management stack, so to speak. I offer these 10 questions from their PowerPoint playbook designed to help you determine if your cloud provider is enterprise-ready.

1. How do they instrument and report to ensure end-user performance SLAs are met?
2. How do they enable access control and ensure it remains with the enterprise?
3. How do they enable network and application security, and demonstrate that enforcement?
4. What models do they provide for disaster recovery, elasticity, scale and high availability?
5. Can the enterprise easily mimic their existing architectures, still maintain control and easily move between cloud partners?
6. What applications and types are supported?
7. Are systems set up to simplify, secure and optimize virtual machine transfers between the enterprise and the cloud?
8. How do they automate or orchestrate management between the enterprise and cloud provider?
9. What attributes regarding the end user and application (device, location, role, performance, availability) are incorporated into making intelligent traffic management decisions?
10. For all of the questions above, if a provider has a solution, are they different or deficient compared to what the enterprise is already doing? Is the enterprise required to support a different model for each provider?

I'll be blogging more on their latest "vision announcement" tomorrow. Stay tuned.

Posted by Bruce Hoard on 04/21/2010 at 12:48 PM