by Joe Gleinser
16. November 2009 18:09
When considering a hosted or cloud provider, ask the 10 simple questions below to further your analysis.
Data Center: Are your servers stored in a data center? Please describe your power, data and cooling redundancies?
Compliance: Are you compliant with PCI and SAS 70 standards?
Longevity: What happens in the event your business fails? How do we recover our data? How do we use it, once recovered?
Backup Systems: How do you backup the data? How often is it stored offsite? How is it backed up onsite?
Architecture: Do you utilize virtualization with shared storage?
Reliability: Do you offer a Service Level Agreement? How much credit do we receive when you are down? At what amount of downtime do I receive the credit?
Performance: How does our user count compare to your largest client and to your total user count?
Bandwidth: Approximately how much bandwidth per user is required at our office?
Ownership: Do you own the equipment and licenses on which you're hosted?
Support: What are your support departments hours of operation? How is after hours support provided?
This is a quick start but should start separating the real providers from the pretenders.