Your are evaluating cloud solutions, which vendor do you go with? If you were building your own application you would look at Amazon, Rackspace, ninefold and a myriad of others. If your choosing a CRM or ERP then your choice is (often) limited to whomever the vendor has teamed with. Whatever the situation, here are the key areas you need to evaluate providers against.
- Reputation
- Security
- Flexibility
- Pricing
- Recovery
- Failover
- Environment
- Test
Reputation – get a customer list and call some of them up. Focus your efforts on companies your size.
Security – there’s a lot of security standards, make sure that you are comfortable with the suppliers processes and procedures.
Flexibility – look for providers that allow you to add your specific needs, plus the ability to add and take down servers ‘on the fly’.
Pricing – work out costs before you implement and ensure that there is a standardised price list.
Recovery – make sure the data recovery plan is good( minimum of a second location). Also, if the provider goes out of business or their service drops, that you have the ability to switch providers.
Failover - Cloud Platforms have built-in failover. How does the provider plans for failures on premise as well as off premise and make sure this matches to your needs.
Environment – if this is important to your business, ensure that the provider gets audited by a relevent body.
Test – test the provider on a small service before moving all your business systems across.
