Week 8 - Are You Ready?

Greetings Cloud Computing Bloggers,
We are now 2/3 of the way through our Blog journey through Cloud Computing and Governance with Bellevue University.

One of the biggest questions when an organization is thinking about transitioning to the Cloud is if they are ready for the transition.  It sounds trivial but it is a huge question to pick apart and delve into as a company.  If you do not have a general knowledge about what the CSP has to offer then you are just setting yourself up for failure in the future.

In my opinion, the most important question to ask, is if your Service Level Agreement (SLA) has been solidified and concrete enough that it covers any type of issues that might arise once you have transitioned.  An example of something that needs to be covered in an SLA is the average up-time of the Cloud.  If you comb through some standard SLAs you will see some will mention a 99% up-time or a 99.9% up-time.  These are pretty "near perfect" numbers, but when you are given access 24/7 it is simple to state that you have fulfilled that number by going back to the very beginning of service.  A good addition to this SLA would be a stipulation with how long the CSP can be inoperable.  There was one example that stated that the service could only be down for a total of 30 minutes or less or less or else there would be a percentage of refunds for every minute over 30 minutes taken off of the monthly bill from the CSP.

I would encourage all organizations to stand up a department that has the sole responsibility of all SLA and contractual obligations to ensure there are no loopholes written in by the CSP to get around outages or data protection and liabilities.  All responsibility should be directed towards the CSP as they are the entity that is being trusted with the Platform, Software and Infrastructure in the Cloud that is provided to the client.

That is all I have for you all this week!! Until next time!