There are many advantages of transferring one or more IT services to the cloud, including reduced capital costs, potentially lower operational costs, more significant support for mobile and remote staff, and flexibility in infrastructure. Cloud computing will transform the corporate perception of IT as a cost center when properly applied to a strategic advantage that positively impacts top-line revenues.
Yet not all providers of cloud services are created equal. Service providers can vary considerably, to name a few, in many attributes such as reliability, security, and support. Nonetheless, if you switch your IT service to a vendor that does not meet the minimum standard that your organization needs for a specific quality of service, the end-users, and C-level executives will undoubtedly learn about it. In this article, we will talk about the vital attributes that cloud hosting services should have, just like what IBM iSeries hosting offers to its clients.
Reliability
Critical market resources are precisely that important! Businesses can not afford to downgrade their IT infrastructure because an interruption can significantly impact the industry. Delayed quotes, missed calls or emails, and unshared documents can all affect top-line revenue and bottom-line expenses. Reliability is about reducing the risk of an interruption of operation. Seek for service providers with a history of limited cloud outages.
Availability
The quality has to do with reliability. Although reliability is an indicator of how often a service goes down (or stays up vice versa), when service goes down, availability is about the recovery time. Ideally, you want a service provider with the fewest outages and the shortest ones.
Scalability
Its ability to scale to whatever size you need and to be available wherever you need it is a huge benefit of cloud services. Network providers need to be located in appropriate data centers worldwide to accommodate consumer connections from wherever the company does. Look for service providers that can meet the needs of the locations in your company.
Protection
Inadequate security is one potential disadvantage of moving your IT services to an outside cloud. If there are no appropriate and necessary security safeguards in place for the cloud service provider, protection could be compromised. Look for cloud providers that have incorporated multi-factor authentication into their operation and in-transit and at-rest complete encryption for content. Centralized security policies are also essential to manage remote/local devices.
Service Quality
For most companies, providing a service is not good enough, particularly when the service has a real-time dimension to it, such as voice/video calls or web meetings. The secret to the quality of service is to find service providers who monitor and operate as much of the solution as possible, including infrastructure technology, bandwidth access, and network equipment. The more controlled and controllable a service provider, the better the QoS will be.