A move to the cloud brings serious benefits, particularly for startups who often need to ramp up their IT capacity quickly without the burden of investing in new hardware or training staff. If your company is ready to offload its applications to the cloud, how do you decide which provider is right for you?
The standard questions about pricing and capacity are fairly obvious. For example, most people would probably think to ask things like: How much will this cost me (i.e. what is the cost per hour)? What hardware specs do we get for the price?
Yet beyond budget and capacity, there are several other factors that can impact your experience. Here are seven other questions every startup should ask a potential cloud provider:
You need to know if a service will be up and running when your business needs it. Of course, all cloud providers will promote their system’s stability. You need to dig beyond the marketing materials to understand the provider’s infrastructure and if it’s backed up with a meaningful Service Level Agreement. Research their outage history: what were the average and maximum downtime lengths? How did the provider respond to past outages?