10 Things To Look For In Your Cloud Service Provider The cloud computing market is exploding with a large number of new entrants. If you are shopping around for a cloud service provider (CSP), here are ten things you should keep in mind. 1. Technical Expertise A cloud computing service is not a commodity: it is not as simple as providing you with a computer in a server farm. It requires a lot of technical expertise to set up the right system that guarantees security for your data and lets you run your business without interruption. Thus, the first thing you
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Cloud Compliance Audit: Learn More On The Unified Certification Standard From The MSP Alliance I have written previously about various types of audits that are necessary to validate your cloud service. In this post, I will cover the cloud service audit that helps you pick the right cloud service provider (CSP). While it is important that customers take the initiative in checking the various guarantees offered by the vendor on their own, it is helpful to have an industry certification that verifies each of the major parameters and that backup the vendor’s claims. The Unified Certification Standard (UCS) from the
Disaster Management Checklist For Cloud Computing Customers Last week I covered some aspects of disaster management on the cloud. I will continue where I left off and cover more details on the disaster planning part. Here is a checklist of things you must have for disaster planning and recovery. What are the emergency contact number and email addresse(s) of the cloud service provider (CSP)? Is there a backup account with another CSP? How soon can the backups be activated to restore services? Are the data and applications in the backup regularly updated? What is the minimum working subset that should
The 5 Best Ways For Startups And Small Business To Leverage The Cloud The number of cloud apps targeted at small businesses and startups has exploded in the past few years. While hundreds of new cloud apps come out every month, many of the categories are still not mature enough for enterprise usage. Some applications are highly suited to the cloud (such as communication management), while other applications (such as video editing) are still more suited to the desktop. This distinction is especially important for small businesses who don’t have a big IT team to fix the issues. In this
Adobe Creative Cloud: Creation On The Cloud Last week Adobe released the long-awaited CS6, which comes with Creative Cloud. Creative Cloud provides a simple subscription option ($50/month) to access Adobe’s complete Creative Suite (Photoshop, Illustrator, Indesign, After Effects, Dreamweaver and Flashbuilder), which costs $2600 to buy retail. The package also includes a 20 GB free storage space for storing files. While this is not a typical SaaS model, and the applications still reside on client’s computers as in previous editions, this is a big step for Abobe, and the pricing model could be a disruptive influence in the sector. What
Is Your Company Ready For A Cloud Service Outage? If you are using one of the major CSPs (cloud service providers) you may already be used to major service outages. Amazon EC2, Rackspace, Google Apps and Microsoft Azure have all had their fair share of outages in the past 18 months, and some of them have been huge failures (Amazon’s April 2011 outage lasted 47 hours for some customers), which have brought down sites such as Reddit. However, companies such as Netflix have been able to survive the outages well. In this post, I will cover details on how you
The Top Five Threats To Cloud Computing With hundreds of enterprises migrating to cloud services every day, it looks like the march to cloud everything is inevitable and unstoppable. However, cloud computing is not without its risks, and in this post, I will cover the top five issues that pose a threat to increased cloud adoption by enterprises. Highly fragmented market In most areas of computing, it is a winner-take-all market. Whether it is Facebook or Google search, or Windows or iPhone, most markets in our world face either a monopoly or a duopoly. While such markets pose their own
Keeping Your Data And Applications Secure On The Cloud When you have all your data and applications permanently stored within your enterprise, you can get away with big security holes and poor data management practices without a serious external threat. However, once your applications and data move to the cloud, your margin for error becomes much smaller. Confidential enterprise data could be traveling all over the public Internet, enabling your employees to work anywhere, anytime, while at the same time exposing data to malicious eyes. In this post, I will cover some of the things your organization needs to get
