With agility, accessibility, and adaptability high on many CIOs agendas, more and more organisations are moving parts of their operations into the cloud.
However, transitioning to the cloud is a process that needs to be carefully managed. You need to choose a cloud services provider that can give your organisation the technological knowledge and strategic implementation that it requires.
As with any industry, cloud service providers can range from small innovative competitively-priced start-ups to large international companies offering a range of services and a range of data centres across the globe.
To help you choose the right cloud partner, Crimson’s IT consultants have put together a list of 20 questions that you can ask of potential cloud service providers to your business:
- What is your approach to compliance and risk management?
- Do you have audit results to prove compliance?
- Who owns the cloud infrastructure?
- Is data kept in a database with other customers’ data?
- If data is stored in a shared environment, how secure is it?
- Can your company comply with the regulatory requirements of different countries?
- What types of cloud services do you offer and which clients utilise these services?
- Do you perform cloud migrations on a regular basis? How many have you performed?
- Will the migration process cause any interruptions to our operations or services?
- If you aren’t managing the end-to-end migration process, how are gaps addressed?
- If my organisation’s IT department is involved in the migration, is their role clearly defined in mutually acceptable terms?
- Does your SaaS solution support complete, end-to-end business processes?
- Will we need to tweak or rewrite any of our applications?
- Are social and mobile capabilities embedded in those business processes?
- How have you addressed infrastructure resiliency with regards to security and disaster recovery?
- Will we be able to give certain users access to data anytime, anywhere and be able to restrict access to others?
- If we want to connect ERP apps with HCM or CRM apps, is that integration built in?
- How many data centres do you have around the world?
- What are the costs, how are they paid, can you provide a long and short term summary of these costs?
- What are the contract termination terms?
If you would like a FREE cloud assessment for your organisation or simply to find out more about our Microsoft Azure services please contact marketing@crimson.co.uk or call 01675 466 477.
Crimson is an IT consultancy, an IT solutions provider, an IT recruitment agency, and a Microsoft Gold Partner with offices in Birmingham and the City of London.
