It is extremely important to your business that your services remain up at all times. Therefore, you need a reliable Cloud Service Provider that can guarantee service level and uptime. When examining a Cloud Service Provider, ask these questions:
How Does the Provider Ensure Service Reliability and Availability?
The Cloud Service Provider should have certain safety nets in place to ensure services are consistently available. These include redundancy of power, Internet connection, cooling systems, fire suppression systems, servers, storage, and security systems. Check that they have these in place and check the details.
What is the Track Record of Service Uptime?
Uptime is a measure of the time service has been properly functioning, without any downtime. Find out what the track record is for your Cloud Service Provider’s uptime – how long have they gone without downtime? Are there any past disasters that have caused them to let down their customers?
What SLAs Can the Provider Guarantee?
Your Cloud provider should guarantee their hosting services by providing an SLA (Service Level Agreement) for all services. The Industry standard SLA offerings are often measured in percentages.
For telecommunications and standard internet infrastructure the standard runs from a 99% to 99.9% to 99.99% to 99.999% uptime guarantee.
If you include application service(s) such as Leecare the standard runs typically from 96% to 98% uptime guarantee depending on the type of service being delivered.
This SLA is associated not only with the service you can expect, but also often comes with a money-back or similar type of guarantee.
You may have to pay according to the SLA level your business requires for your service. Be sure that you are comfortable with the SLA offering from your Cloud provider as it reflects the security you can expect for your Cloud service.
Data, applications, email, servers, networks, and operating systems are the life-blood of most organisations. Therefore it is extremely important to compare and research Cloud Service Providers before trusting your valuable information to the Cloud.
Doveria has architected our cloud environment specifically for reliability, performance, and data protection and to help us achieve this we operate out of Australia’s first tier 4 data center.
A tier 4 data center is considered as most robust and less prone to failures. Tier 4 is designed to host mission critical servers and computer systems, with fully redundant subsystems (cooling, power, network links, storage etc) and compartmentalized security zones controlled by biometric access controls methods.
Special thanks to David Garrett who prepared this post.
