Cloud Hosting: Key Considerations in Provider Selection

Deciding to deploy cloud hosting is the first step in leveraging a powerful new technology.  At this point, you’ve analyzed your requirements and compared them to the benefits you expect to gain from a cloud solution.  You’ve decided a virtualized environment makes sense for your organization.  So, now you need to select a vendor for cloud hosting.

• Connectivity.  Your cloud solution is only as good as the network behind it.  Therefore, you need to carefully assess a provider’s connectivity capabilities.  Your prime concerns should be network availability and performance.

• Flexibility.  If you need to quickly scale, does the provider’s existing environment allow you to do so quickly and easily?  Cloud solutions will almost always be more agile than in-house operations.  But you’ll still need to evaluate how fast you can procure, deploy and configure new hardware to meet demands.

• Security.  If you must comply with PCI or HIPAA, or your operation requires a high degree of security, you’ll need to verify the capabilities of your hosting provider.  You should look for facilities that have completed a SSAE16 Type II audit.

• Support.  Will your provider offer on-site support 24/7?  If your operation must be “always on,” you need to assure you’ll have access to experienced, certified staff.

• Availability.  Availability will be guaranteed through a Service Level Agreement (SLA).  Typically, providers guarantee above 99.9%.  Although this may sound like near perfect availability, you need to translate this percentage into actual downtime.  For example, if your provider guarantees 99.95% uptime, this actually means you could experience 21 minutes of downtime each month.  Can you live with that?  If not, look for a provider that offers 100% uptime through an SLA.

CyrusOne offers an enablement platform for the cloud called “Sky for the Cloud™.” We provide the data center infrastructure or  “home” for the cloud in a customized data hall so businesses can successfully run their cloud systems.  It’s designed for optimizing Power Usage Effectiveness (PUE) and enabling fast interconnection to an ecosystem of business partners, content providers, networks, carriers, Internet service providers and Ethernet buyers and sellers.

“Sky for the Cloud” includes peering within a single location to more quickly and affordably pull content from the edge of the Internet to the heart of the data center. The new platform will provide interconnection of all CyrusOne facilities in Texas, including Austin, Dallas, Houston, San Antonio and Phoenix.

Continue to read the CyrusOne Blog for information about Cloud Hosting.