Any enterprise consuming Cloud Service Provider (CSP) services must conduct sufficient due diligence to:
- Clearly understand CSP responsibilities, enterprise responsibilities, and demarcation between the two
- Ensure that CSP IT governance processes and procedures are compatible with those of the enterprise and its operating environment
- Ensure that operating on the CSP infrastructure is compliant with any legal, regulatory, or industry requirements
- Ensure that the enterprise has sufficient operational visibility and documentation to meet all audit and security requirements
- Ensure that the CSP offers “true cloud computing”
- If using a multitenant deployment, ensure that each tenant’s data is isolated and is not visible or accessible to other tenants
- Identify the drivers. Do any of the following sound appealing to your decision makers?
- OpEx: Enables companies to pay per use and avail themselves of pricing structures like monthly or quarterly leasing agreements
- Scalability: Users have access to many resources that scale based on user demand.
- Elasticity: The environment transparently manages a user’s resource utilization based on dynamically changing needs.
- Virtualization: Each user has a single view of the available resources, independent of how they are arranged in terms of physical devices.
- Cost: The pay-per-usage model allows an organization to pay only for the resources they need with basically no investment in the physical resources available in the cloud. There are no infrastructure maintenance or upgrade costs.
- Mobility: Users can access data and applications from around the globe.
- Collaboration: Users are starting to see the cloud as a way to work simultaneously on common data and information.
- Risk reduction: Users can use the cloud to test ideas and concepts before making major investments in technology.