8 tips to help CIOs simply choose cloud computing Vendors

The following recommendations can make these tedious things easier, as CIOs always go to the CEO's office and tell CEOs that important business needs advanced technical services that do not require a lot of capital to spend, or that these important businesses will be postponed before they are formally executed.

Steven Peltzman, a CIO at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Steven Pezman. "Turn off the cloud service switch, and there must be additional capacity." All you have to do is close it and start again. ”

Not every cloud vendor can do this, of course. Some service providers do not even offer such services. For example, an infrastructure, or service provider, Amazon Network Service needs to do too much work to anticipate a relatively small IT project.

In the face of a list of hyper-budget projects, Peltzman of the Museum of Modern Art examines various cloud services and hopes to expand the function of the Museum of Modern Art at specific times in a specific way. "The broad spectrum of infrastructure, the service IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service), such as Amazon's EC3 series, has many service functions, but it is too long to start," he said. Software like Salesforce.com's online ERP, a service SaaS (Software-as-a-service) provider, is too focused on specific features, he adds. In the end, he chose the Cloudshare service, allowing him to create a virtual environment workgroup on his Cloudshare network.

How to negotiate to get a better cloud contract?

How to find the right cloud provider? Is there a unified list for companies big and small to choose from? Bernard Golden Bernard King, Hyperstratus chief executive of cloud computing consultancy, answers: No.

"A list of cloud items for a manufacturing company can never be the same as a list of services companies or retailers." "Kim said. "The gap between the industries is too great. But there is a consistent thing to be worth seeing. Some of these are specifically for cloud computing providers, many of which you have to look at when signing contracts with outsourcing or any other service provider. ”

1. How does the cloud computing company react?

"How often will they invite you back to the negotiating table?" "James McKee, president of the corporate medical debt buy-out firm at Colorado State, James Mac, said. They won't disclose all the details to you, but I have to let them know how important I am to them and see how they react. Like the reaction my client wants to see from me. Naturally, I would also like to see the same reaction from my suppliers. ”

"Some suppliers may be more sensitive when they start building partnerships, so checking with other customers is important at this point," he said. "Kim said.

2, cloud services in the end how transparent?

"There are many ' mysterious ' cloud services. According to Chris Wolf, an analyst at Burton Group, Kriswolf. If you're using Google's Gmail, you don't have to understand the infrastructure and the company's upgrade plan. However, for all companies that hire functional service providers for their important business, you must know what technology your service provider is using, and who your level two or three provider is and whether they are reliable.

3. How does the cloud provider answer questions about the employee's due diligence?

Some of the most critical issues are sometimes just the basics: for example, the company's security measures, which servers they used, what software they ran, how they responded to disaster recovery, and whether all their employees had been well trained, if the background was examined, and so on.

"All these basic questions are very important. "said Wolff. "You have to know whether the employees they hire are relatively stable and reliable, and you have to check and ensure their contingency communications solutions and the availability of these communication options." This will not be in their power outage when you do not know how to deal with. ”

4, cloud computing provider recognition will provide how many cloud standard services?

"You should explicitly list your criteria to your suppliers, ask them the answers to the standard questions you want to know about, and periodically reaffirm your standards to them." "Kim said. "If this is a large contract, you need to do a regular audit to verify the quality of service agreement (SLA) compliance and other security issues." ”

5. How many standards have been denied by your cloud provider?

On the other hand, none of the service providers promised to devote time to answering customer questions, Kim said.

"They still have to focus on providing their services," Kim said. "Some suppliers will be ready to accept your review throughout the service." But how much does it matter to them to answer the question of a ' 100,000 why ' like you? What's more, your problems are the same as those of 90% other customers. Some services are too extreme: Amazon has published a white paper claiming that ' this is our privacy policy and security process and your responsibility is to make sure that what we do matches your requirements '. ”

"Amazon's approach may be a bit extreme, but you don't want your suppliers to check in on your work when you need to visit the data center." Then their other clients will let them repeat the work to delay their working hours. "Kim said.

6. What is your cloud provider's standard for measuring successful service delivery?

Most IT service contracts specify service levels (bitwise, BYTE, or speed) rather than providing services as customers expect, according to Vince Dimemmo, general manager of the Equinix company's cloud computing and IT services, an infrastructure service provider. The company provides data center infrastructure to support Amazon's EC3 series and other cloud and telecommunications services.

"The quality of service brought about by experience is the standard for choosing a service provider from an end-user perspective." "Dimemmo said. "We apply it to many of our end users ' contracts. And more customers value this standard. ”

7. What does cloud services provide for business to ensure their services are provided?

One of the problems with infrastructure is who the data center is working with, or who is providing the infrastructure services of the data Center service company you are buying. Cloud systems are often built on other clouds, Dimemmo says, which can be said to be an advantage. All or most of the infrastructure that rents the same service provider in a High-performance database can provide customers with more than enough service. Because you only need to study an infrastructure without having to do research on each of the different infrastructures, Dimemmo said.

8. What does the cloud service provider need you to do?

"Cloud computing is designed to make customers feel warm and fuzzy, but those who forget about the need to pay their own responsibilities in cloud computing will never get any quality satisfaction." "Kim said.

"The deployment of infrastructure is the responsibility of the supplier, but the application is yours." "Kim said. "If the structure of your application does not enable it to run effectively in a cloud environment, or if the interface does not match, or if a database server drags down the data center's hind legs, this is not a problem for the cloud services provider." It's part of your responsibility. You must always make sure that you are ready and not go wrong. ”