Storm Clouds – When cloud is not all silver linings.

Cloud can offer increased agility, flexibility, and savings. Certainly, cloud offers added peace of mind and an enhanced feeling of security. No more worrying about whether the correct drive or tape was used for back-ups, and assuredly Amazon and Microsoft have access to greater security and redundancy than most small to medium businesses would. However, with all the benefits, there is still risk associated both with the cloud solutions provider and the SaaS (Software as a Service) provider.

For many of us, we have stuck to the local server and desktop client of our apps so that we know where our data resides, and we can manually back it up. Making those back-ups readily accessible for testing by our internal IT teams or our Information Technology Service Provider. Some of us have placed full faith in cloud vendors and SaaS providers. Many of us remain somewhere in-between as we navigate the best solutions for our organizations and assess our own risk tolerance.

The truth is, outages happen, SaaS and Cloud providers can go out of business, acquisitions take place, major product changes transpire, and mistakes occur. So, how do you protect your organization and your investment when utilizing cloud for business-critical applications?

Here are 6 things you can do to help mitigate risk:

1. Read and understand your Service Level Agreement (SLA)
   Your SLA outlines how service is delivered and defines the standards of good service, explains liabilities and responsibilities, and creates the framework for what is considered timely customer support and repair should failures occur. Be sure that any contract you sign has provisions around what happens with your data in the event of default, acquisition, service changes, bankruptcy and so on.
2. Maintain copies of your data
   Conventional wisdom today is to back up to a cloud solution. This however, does not overshadow the need for redundancy. With back-up in the cloud there is the risk of your data becoming inaccessible in the event of outages or other failures. Best practice recommends keeping (and testing) a local back-up of your mission-critical information.
3. Establish a Cloud Vendor Assessment Policy
   Create a list of factors for the review and assessment of cloud and/or SaaS vendors. Evaluate certifications, standards, service roadmaps, data security, data governance, business policies, reliability, performance, migration support, vendor lock in, exit planning and overall organizational health.
4. Routinely Audit
   It is important to routinely audit your cloud and SaaS providers as part of your annual IT review to ensure that SLA agreements are being met. Your Vendor Assessment Policy is a great tool to help in this annual review.
5. Develop a cloud exit strategy
   Though much time is spent on planning and estimating how to migrate data and/or applications to the cloud, it is equally important to outline an exit strategy, including an alternate provider, the migration process, anticipated expense and impact to your business.
6. Consider business interruption insurance
   If even a brief outage would cause financial strain, you may want to consider business interruption insurance which could help cover some of the costs incurred should you experience a data outage or loss, as well as some of the potential loss of profits.

Cloud is most certainly an important and viable part of IT solutions and infrastructure and many organizations benefit from the agility, flexibility and affordability offered cloud and SaaS providers. Suitability for your business should be reviewed based on the unique needs of your organization. Our skilled team has decades of experience and multiple industry certifications. For more information about how cloud might be of benefit to you, or how we might be of service, please contact us via our website or call 425-748-8855 and let us know how we can help you and your team can experience refreshingly reliable computing.