Don’t Ignore the Service Level Agreement

All public cloud vendors, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS providers, will offer some sort of service level agreement that explains what obligation the vendor assumes and what risks you have to assume. Remember that no vendor will take on obligations it doesn’t have to. So, it’s up to you to read the fine print and understand exactly what reality looks like. For example, no cloud vendor will reimburse you if you lose business because the service is not operational. They may indeed give you the money back that you spent on a service, but that will be small comfort if you’ve lost an important customer.

So, you must decide how much risk is acceptable. This information will help you determine which services can reside with a commodity cloud service provider, which ones need to be with a provider that offers a higher level of service, and which services should remain in your private cloud.