Cloud Formations

At some time, most of us have taken a few moments to lay back outside and dreamily gaze into a blue sky and let our imaginations run wild envisioning things in the cloud formations. Whether we see what appears to be an outline of animal or object, we may ask others around us if they too see what we imagined.

In reality, some of this gazing into cloud formations activity is actually a good fundamental start to considering cloud hosting services for your information technology network. The best place to start is with questions. You can ask service providers and IT professionals questions yourself, but you can learn a lot by listening closely to the questions the IT experts are asking you.

It is difficult to imagine a physician or health care practitioner beginning a medical examination without asking some key questions and taking note of your specific symptoms. Considering a move to a cloud-based IT network is no different.

While there are numerous questions to be expected from the prospect and the vendor, here are a few key topics to inquire about, recommended in one of Oracle’s publicly-published white papers:

• Operational transparency – beyond functionality, what type of professional service and support do you have access to
• Disaster recovery plan – does the vendor have a disaster recovery plan, is it periodically tested and does it actually work
• Security and compliance requirements – what capabilities, policies and procedures are in place. What types and levels of regulatory compliancy are provided
• Cloud solutions – are services capable of being customized to the client’s needs

It is interesting how many information technology vendors will give you their thoughts and opinions on how to run cloud services and maintain a high-level data centers without any actual experience in provision either of those services. Just like gazing at cloud formations, we all tend to envision things differently. Make sure your cloud provider is asking you smart questions and giving you trustworthy answers to your questions.