What You Must Consider When Choosing Cloud Storage Providers

Cloud storage offers several benefits like low infrastructure expenses, high scalability and predicted costs, more reliability and data security to name a few. Many of the businesses have been apprehensive of the public cloud which makes it necessary for you to choose your host with care and after much deliberation. It becomes more important since no two cloud storage providers are similar in their services. There could a wide variance in the pricing, SLAs, security compliances etc which you must consider before you finalize to host with a provider.

Be sure of your requirements:

You must determine what applications and files you intend to store in the cloud. Do you need data backup and recovery or the regular data storage? There are umpteen number of cloud storage providers but you need one that ensures your data is available always. You need a provider who offers both storage and recovery solutions. Data is increasing at tremendous pace and your provider must ensure the storage is scalable and does not require you to keep deleting old data to accommodate new information. Utilizing the services of two different providers for storage and recovery can ensure redundancy but will incur heavier expenditure.

Security aspects:

Choose cloud storage providers who use encryption to protect data stored in the cloud. Ask the providers where and when that the data will be encrypted. The data encryption must be done when it is at rest and before it is transmitted. You must be given decryption keys so that you have control on who can access your data. If your host uses local storage, make sure the local storage is also encrypted. You must be very particular on the security aspect, since technology has also provided the internet fraudsters more possibility of cheating and infiltrate accounts.

Regulatory compliance:

If you are using the public cloud storing of regulated data can become complicated. It should not become an obstacle for you to move your IT to the cloud. Your cloud storage providers must be experienced and have capabilities of ensuring that they give you the regulatory requirements that you need for your business. They should be flexible and allow you to customize and meet your changing regulatory needs. You must detail this out in the SLAs that they offer.

Performance:

The cloud storage providers should be efficient to address the problems associated with low bandwidth. Backups and full server recoveries must be ensured which sometimes have not been as effective as desired even though the providers replicate and compress the content to reduce the volume of data transmission. An initial data backup must be done so that the data is safe before it is encrypted and transmitted on to the different servers.

You must check the SLAs carefully. Some conditions like data access time are fixed there are other points you could negotiate on. Most important points that you should look for is their commitment to network availability and how they measure downtime. You must also consider factors like the server location, security, support, and privacy when you select your host.