The idea of handing part of your IT operations over to an outside agency can be unnerving. And when you partner with a cloud services provider, you are entrusting a portion of your business to a third party—essentially, an outsider. The good news is that enterprises do it every day—and with very real benefits, like speed, agility, and cost savings.
In the recent article Cloud Computing: Would You Trust Your IT Operations To An Outsider? Senior Product Manager Seth Payne talks about key areas for discussion when developing a successful working relationship between cloud consumer and cloud provider.
From the article:
To set the stage, clear lines of communication should be in place so that when issues inevitably arise, enterprises and cloud providers can work together to find resolutions—without pointing fingers and playing blame games.
Cloud providers must hold up their end by offering complete transparency when it comes to their policies, underlying infrastructure and support/maintenance procedures.
While operational risk is inherent when adopting any cloud platform, most enterprise consumers recognize that no IT implementation, whether cloud or on-premises, can be undertaken without some degree of risk.
Cloud providers can help mitigate any concerns by clearly outlining potential risks and the procedures in place to deal with them. Key areas for discussion should include:
- High-level storage, compute and networking architectures
- Data center specifications
- Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for outages and recovery plans
- Disaster mitigation processes
