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The cloud and virtual server market has seen immense expansion in these recent years, especially all the more now that ageing copper line telephone network is slowly yet surely being phased with the end goal being to shut it down by 2026.

As part of these developments, there are more choices now than ever before, which begs the question – how do you decide what Cloud solution you should be using?

It’s simply human nature to be influenced by price so we asked ourselves the question, what else you should consider when looking for a Cloud provider.

When entering an agreement for anything you need to know the service you are being offered. Remember if something sounds too good to be true, it more than likely is. Where Cloud is concerned you need to know if you have access to a support desk, if so, what time does this support desk operate– does this match your business pattern?

Is there a clear escalation path available to you if you need it? Can you phone and speak to a human, or is support only available via email or online chat. These might seem like simple questions, but more and more support is being offered via online chat by automated “chatbots” which is not a suitable solution for an on-demand cloud environment.

First of all, let’s define what RTO and RPO are. RTO is Recovery Time Objective and RPO is Recovery Point Objective.

Recovery Time Objective is the length of time a business deems acceptable for their systems to be down before it puts the future of the business at risk. Recovery Point Objective looks at the data of a company and how much data can be lost if a disaster were to strike before it was to have a serious impact on a business. RPO can be determined by looking at the amount of time between data backups and how much data could potentially be lost between these backups.

Once you have defined these, you need to ensure that your provider can give you a suitable data backup pattern that meets your requirements.

Any service is only going to be good for you when it works. A service level agreement will clearly define the agreed timelines for a service from a supplier. You need to ensure that the SLA being offered from the Cloud provider ensures you can meet your RPO & RTO.

So, there you have it. Yes, as with anything in life and in business, price is very important. But businesses should be mindful of making it the be-all and end-all to ensure that they are paying for a service that meets the requirements of their business.