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// FEATURE // not going to get to talk to anyone whilst the incident is ongoing .
Every supplier and every infrastructure is going to experience downtime at some point . The key things here are frequency , recovery times and communication .
Maximising the benefits of cloud
Despite the shortcomings of many public cloud services , SMEs shouldn ’ t necessarily abandon this approach . There remain major benefits to cloud offerings to better support hybrid and remote working , improving agility and business resiliency . Rather , SMEs should take the time to understand the hosted services they are considering implementing , what the limitations and costs associated with each service are and whether these properly align with business goals and budgets .
They should ask themselves the following questions when exploring hosted solution :
1 . How is our current solution performing ? Is it meeting expectations and providing a strong return on investment ?
2 . How much will it cost , and do alternative cloud providers offer better value for money ? ( Be sure to look at a range of
alternatives here – do not just plump for Azure or AWS , there are many smaller , excellent private cloud vendors around )
3 . Will this service ensure adequate service resiliency and data protection ?
4 . What will be the ultimate return on your investment ? Whether this means operational efficiency , Business Continuity or operational savings , it should serve the best interest of your business . ( Be sure to consider this beyond a mere bottom line cost comparison of the tech solutions under consideration )
Maintaining transparency
Transparency is vitally important to any organisation looking to move their services to the cloud . Being able to understand – to a reasonable extent – the underlying infrastructure , its performance capabilities , its resiliency , recovery capabilities , what it ’ s going to cost you and having someone real to talk to about all this , including when there is a problem , should be critical criteria .
The actual key to achieving that is to either have relevant in-house knowledge and expertise to oversee your tech stack , or a trusted , expert consultancy that is not captured by any one vendor . Without this , you may well get lost in the cloud . �
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