Cloud Computing for the Enterprise

Up to now, a lot of the focus around cloud computing has been on rapid deployment, cost, and flexibility. These are all important, but more is needed in an enterprise setting. Enterprise customers need the efficiencies gained from improved management and automation capabilities, as well as the flexibility to use converged services such as PaaS (Platform as a Service). A Peer1 Hosting white paper suggests some additional characteristics you should be looking at in an enterprise-class cloud provider.

1. What are the capabilities of the infrastructure underlying the vendor's offering? What redundancies and reliability measures are in place?
2. What level of support is available? Most enterprises need round-the-clock support by front-line experts who can quickly resolve performance or availability issues.
3. What facilities are available to ease deployment? How easy is it to set up best practices templates that can be leveraged for consistency across the enterprise?
4. How hard is it to manage the environment? In what ways does the vendor support methods to ease patch management, monitoring, or job scheduling across the environment?
5. What support is available for inventory management? VM sprawl is a real problem in an environment where the cost of setting up and abandoning systems is "cheap."
6. Is there support to allow different business units to manage aspects of their own environments separate from other departments or the overall enterprise?
7. Does the vendor offer additional layers of converged services, such as PaaS (Platform as a Service) or DaaS (Database as a Service)? If so, are the offerings aligned with the enterprise's overall technology direction?
8. To what extent has the vendor simplified the overall management process?