3 Tips for Choosing a Cloud Hosting Provider

3 Tips for Choosing a Cloud Hosting Provider

Introduction

Cloud computing has transformed the IT landscape, public cloud offerings can help businesses reduce costs and increase business agility. These cloud services offer enormous economic benefits but they also pose significant potential risks for enterprises that must protect corporate data while complying with industry and government regulations. The purpose of this article to help enterprises make pragmatic decisions about specific issues that should be identified before selecting a hosting provider.

Data Centre

To me this is the biggest issue, the industry leaders will have their own state-of-the-art data centres and they will be geographically spread out to help reduce risk. That is not to say that there aren't some excellent vendors out there that use other data centres, yet still provide a world class support service, but as a rule of thumb I prefer vendors to have their own data centres and a few of them. I would also visit the data centres before making a decision and see how secure are they, what is your general feel about the place.

Outages

The proof of the pudding is in the eating. All vendors like to claim 99.9 % of uptime, but 80% of stats are made up. Joking. The truth though is often different because everyone naturally has selection criteria of what counts as an outage, completely understandable, so speak to existing clients and see what they say about how many times the vendor hosted systems were down over the previous year and for how long.

Platform

Most vendors that we have dealt with run on VMware, but there are some that use other systems, whether mainstream or proprietary, it is important to know which virtualisation software they use. Again, call me boring, but I prefer VMware, not only is it tried and tested, but should you ever want to leave, it's a relatively simple process. Should you choose a vendor with different virtualisation software to the vendor you are moving to it will be no simple matter.

George Toursoulopoulos is a financial technology specialist and Director at Synetec, one of the UK’s leading providers of bespoke financial services software solutions.