Folks - to throw in another 2 cents worth (or twopence if you prefer) one thing people looking at service providers might want to think about is the relationship between you, the service provider and the back-end infrastructure provider. In many cases the service provider does not own their own hardware but uses another organisation - as has been pointed out this may be Amazon or one of the other major players. In any event the issue is that often you will not have any contractual relationship with the company on which your data actually resides. Most contracts have a nasty set of clauses that boil down to a situation where if your service provider does not pay their bills to the back end infrastructure provider then the service is firstly switched off and then 30-60 days later the infrastructure provider have the right to delete the data. In this case even proving that you have your data on their infrastructure is a problem (assuming of course you know who to contact and are actually aware that there is even an issue in the first place) and getting it back is a nightmare scenario. I accept than finance people tend not to get the technical stuff but they sure as heck understand contracts and who owns what so this might ring a few alarm bells before you are forced off down the cloud route.
Posts by Marcp
4 publicly visible posts • joined 21 Feb 2013
Biting the hand that feeds IT
