Better research means better cloud for businesses

Friday, October 01, 2010

When it comes to choosing a cloud provider, IT experts say the more research the better.

With its instant scalability on demand and pay-as-you-go pricing, many companies are drawn toward the cloud. However, before signing any contract, businesses need to research their options to find which service is best for them, tech columnist David Carr recently wrote in Forbes.

Essentially, with cloud hosting, businesses are billed according to how much bandwidth, disk space and memory their web applications occupy on a collection of servers. Each cloud provider offers various levels of capacity and other services based on contracts and capabilities.

“Just because a service is right for someone else doesn’t mean it’s right for your business,” Carr writes. “And these newfangled cloud services may or may not be the best answer for you, either.”

It is up to the customer to determine what services, if any, work best for his or her company, Carr writes, and the best way to do that is by researching of what’s out there.

There is no consistent checklist to go through when selecting a cloud provider. Online reviews of hosting companies can be useful for giving a general feeling of what a service is like. However, many IT experts say the best way to determine the right cloud vendor is meeting with them in person.