“What we’re seeing right now is a very bland set of contractual terms from these providers because they are delivering a one-size-fits-all contract,” said Cochrane. “They don’t want to deviate from a standard set of Ts and Cs for any one customer, no matter how big they are. Their position is that they are offering a standard service at a very low cost point therefore they’re not interested in giving a tailored service.”
This puts the onus back onto the customer to make sure they have got the right processes and tools in place to handle the service the cloud-service provider gives. When a customer terminates a contract, the odds are the provider is not going to be very interested in helping them extract their data.
“They’re going to assume that it’s your problem and within 30 days they’re going to delete your data. It’s a real buyer beware situation. One of the challenges that cloud is presenting for customers who are used to having an on-premise solution or even a third party outsourced deal is that things that were outsourced or nicely packaged are now going to be spread around,” said Cochrane.
Risk analysis
According to Lorcan Cunningham, managing director of Savenet, doing a full risk analysis should be the first action a company thinking about cloud migration takes.
“You need to be thinking about what happens if your cloud provider goes bust or someone pulls the plug in a data centre because they’re not paying their bill and you cannot get access to your data? You need to be thinking about how do you get that information back and how would that affect your business.” he said.
We’ve had some small to medium sized companies moving from other providers to us who had various issues in terms of service or they were oversold in terms of expectations and then decided they weren’t happy. It’s not an easy process, not so much because of the costs involved, although there are costs, but in that it requires a lot of planning and organisation to move successfully, Oliver Surdival, CloudStrong
“Likewise, you need to think about how you might mechanically recover your data — if you have several terabytes and maybe 100 virtual machines, it might not be feasible to pull all that data out across the Internet. There might be an option to talk to the cloud provider to export your VMs out onto moveable media but there could be a charge for that, and a timeframe that they’re willing to work to.”
“If that takes X amount of days to do, where does that leave your migration plan in the meanwhile?”
A further piece of advice offered by Cunningham is that it is good practice for companies using cloud providers to make sure that back-ups are not stored with the same provider as live data.
“It is important for cloud-to-cloud back-up and cloud-to-cloud disaster recovery that you don’t have all your eggs in the one basket. If I put my servers into the Azure platform and I get Microsoft to do the back-ups for me then you end up with your back-ups and your primary machines with the one provider. What happens if I want to move or something happens and Microsoft decides to shut the whole thing down, giving me two or three weeks’ notice to get everything out?” he said.
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