By now, you should have a better idea of which service(s) are right for your organization. But, with so many cloud providers vying for your business, how do you select the right one? The most critical aspect of the selection process is to ensure you are considering the needs of the organization, determining whether the provider meets those needs.
The following are considerations to build a “must-have” list when searching for a service provider.
Market Specialization
Is your organization in an industry vertical that must meet specific compliance standards or certifications? If so, your service provider should specialize in helping organizations like yours, ensuring you maintain adherence your industry’s mandates.
Geography
Does your organization have particular requirements regarding where data, systems, and applications are to be hosted?
Hosting Model
Do you want your workloads stored in a public cloud (e.g. Microsoft Azure or AWS), a colocation, or the provider’s facilities?
Data Center Architecture
What kind of hardware does your applications need to run on? Is the data center designed for complete redundancy? Is the hardware designed for data center use? Is it commodity hardware?
DR Services Offered
Of the services you identified using the table above, are they offered by a given provider?
Service Levels
What are your requirements around service levels from a performance, availability, and recoverability standpoint for each workload involved? Consider these in conjunction with the provider’s hosting model to identify if there are any dependencies that may make meeting service levels difficult.
Recovery Objectives
What are your per-workload Recovery Time and Recovery Point Objectives? Despite offering the services you need, can the provider meet (and exceed) your recovery objectives?
Pricing Model
What kind of cost structure best fits your organization? Does it need to be entirely an operating expense? Can some capital expense be incurred, if necessary? What kind of budget is available for DR, and can the allotted budget grow over time?
Making the Right Choice
By understanding each of the services offered, what they bring to the DR table, and how they will be used to keep your business running, you can align your own business requirements with the appropriate services. This not only clears up the confusion, but also empowers you to form the foundation for creating a new cloud-based DR strategy, complete with a seasoned provider that will work to help you meet your recovery objectives.
CyberFortress Provides Custom Solutions
As a Veeam Disaster Recovery Provider we help business go through the above questions, working to create a custom solution. To learn more about what we do and get started, contact our Veeam Cloud Provider Team.
We’ve also created the “Confusion as a Service” ebook to help take some of the confusion out of selecting the right recovery-related, cloud-based services for your company. You can download your copy here.
