Basis of cloud selection – Backups, Service Level Agreement, Location, Exit Strategy and Accessibility
We discussed the importance of four parameters while selecting cloud computing that custom software companies in India take into consideration. We discusses other five parameters namely backups, service level agreement (SLA), location, exit strategy and accessibility below.
- Backups
This parameter shall help understanding if the cloud providers offer better/faster backup and recovery of your data, and so will be going to the cloud part of your disaster recovery / business continuity solution.
- Service Level Agreement
While selecting the cloud provider, one should look for the answers to the following questions:
- Can the service provider deliver on your service level requirements?
- Can they provide a history of outages, recovery times, and impact to the customer?
The downtime can be far more devastating financially than the credits received back from the provider for missing an SLA.
- Location:
The facility should be physically secure. It should be checked if it is located on a fault line. The high risk area/coast should be explored. Also if they are geographically diverse, how their International relations are can be explored. If they have data centres offshore is the data replicated to those data centres in time is another related question.
- Exit Strategy
The time required to move out of the cloud, or to another provider needs to be calculated. Selection of a cooperative cloud provider who would deliver seamless transition in that case is important.
- Accessibility
The companies opting for cloud should have the access to their data whenever needed within no time. Making sure that the corporate strategy and technology strategy require that users have 24/7 access to data, regardless of geography and platform.
