According to a survey conducted by RightScale in February this year, 94 per cent of organisations surveyed were experimenting with Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). Before you race off and choose an IaaS provider, ask yourself these questions.
1. Service levels
- Does the provider offer your required service level agreement (SLA)? Eg. 99.9%, 99.95%,100%
- Does the SLA cover 24x7x365?
2. Service and support
- Does the IaaS provider give you direct access to the technical support team?
- What are the support times and support channels (email, phone)?
- Is there an account manager assigned to each individual customer account?
- Is engineer support available 24x7?
3. Certifications
- Is the provider Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) certified?
- Is the provider ISO27001 certified?
- Does the provider fulfil Australian Government standards (ASIO T4, DSD)?
4. Managed hosting
- Do you require managed hosting? Eg. Do you want to pass full management and responsibility to the service provider? They can take care of everything from configuring operating systems and backups to providing platform testing.
5. Billing
- Is there a monitoring portal that allows measuring of service consumption in near real-time?
- Does the portal allow you to set thresholds and get notifications when you exceed them?
- Are the commercial terms fixed or negotiable?
6. Service management
- Does the portal allow the setup of different accounts with individual user access policies? Eg. One user to configure the firewall, one user to view the bill.
- Are all portals available to you in order to manage your infrastructure? Eg. Compute, network, storage, firewall, load balancer etc.
- Can you upgrade, downgrade and order new elements online?
- Do provisioning times for new elements or change requests meet your business needs?
7. Technology
- Are critical services built on dedicated technology? Eg. Dedicated firewall or shared firewall.
- Are you running a hybrid infrastructure (colocation, private cloud, public cloud, dedicated managed servers, on-premise servers) and does the provider support this?
- Is the technology powerful enough? Eg. What specs do you need?
- Does the provider offer all the value added services you need? Eg. Backup, patch management, multiple storage tiers, load balancers, global server load balancer.
- Does the provider offer the storage options you need? Eg. Storage for archives, normal server load, databases or ultra high workloads
- Do the disaster recovery (DR) solutions meet your needs? Eg. Price, DR location, ease of DR implementation, monitoring, maturity of DR solution.
8. Location
- Does your solution require hosting in Australia?
- Do you prefer to do business with a local partner?
- Do you need local Australia support?
9. Data Centre
- Does the data centre fulfil all required certifications?
- Is the data centre highly reliable and available?
- Does the data centre support your rack size?
- What is the provider’s outage history?