Choosing the right cloud hosting provider can be a daunting task for many company managers. Surely,storing your data safely in the cloud offers more than enough perks, but one needs to make sure that the decision concerning the cloud provider is the right one. Nowadays, there are plenty of cloud hosting providers out there, each trying to lure you into using their services. Still, each company has different requirements and the choice of the right provider will depend on these.
Identify your business needs
There isn’t the single best cloud provider that all companies should choose. Companies should rather examine their own business needs and set the exact cloud expectations based on this. Not all the applications are equally critical to business processes, so the company should start by identifying the most important ones. After deciding on the appropriate cloud deployment model, a company should then evaluate all the benefits and risks of moving to the cloud.
Be aware of security Issues
Adopting cloud services has become a worldwide trend but many companies still hesitate to make the transition from traditional hosting to cloud servers. According to many surveys, security issues are still the major impediment for doing so. Therefore, the first thing your company needs to inquire about is the security level a particular cloud hosting provider offers. The company should seek out the provider that uses the strongest encryption and requires an appropriate authentication process. Once the security question is resolved, the rest is much easier.
Make an appropriate SLA
Service Level Agreement (SLA) stands for a set of rules under which you agree to have your services provided by an external cloud vendor. The right cloud provider is the one that guarantees maximum uptime and offers a stable disaster recovery solution. Make sure you have the SLA tailored according to your own business needs. Inquire about the server location, backup plans and data security in order to fully understand the offer you are about to accept.
Examine disaster recovery plan
Though cloud hosting is usually considered more secure than the traditional on-premise servers, your provider may as well experience outages or downtime. It is important that you work out a realistic disaster scenario so you would know what to expect from your cloud provider. Here again it is important to be sure about the exact location of the server your data is stored at. Besides this, insist that you know what steps will be taken in case of a disaster and how much would it take for your data to be recovered.
Consider the prices
The price of the cloud hosting service will probably be the starting point for many companies.Depending on a cloud provider and your business needs the price of the services can vary significantly.Cloud is usually regarded as a cost-effective solution but the financial benefits are not always as important as the data security or control is. Therefore, it is important that the provider is chosen according to the needs of a particular business. If it is the right solution, the financial benefits will follow as well.