Beyond the SLA: Choosing a Financially Sound Cloud Provider

January 16, 2014 Off By David

Grazed from DataCenter Knowledge. Author: Shawn Mills.

Cloud computing brings a certain set of risks. By nature customers put their faith in service providers to protect their data and keep it readily available. Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are meant to protect the customer in case of downtime, allowing them to sue if data is inaccessible. Part of an SLA is generally a degree of redundancy, guaranteeing that every server and piece of infrastructure is backed up with an equivalent version. Customers often had their own data backups as well. An SLA, however, doesn?t protect anyone once a company is bankrupt.

In September, Nirvanix, a cloud storage company founded in 2007, suddenly revealed they were declaring bankruptcy. Users had two weeks?later extended until mid-October?to migrate their data, or lose it forever. With large customers storing 10 to 20 petabytes of data, those few weeks suddenly seemed like a few days. These types of shutdowns happen infrequently, but they do occur…

In 2011 four cloud storage companies shut down, including one owned by EMC. Provider shutdowns raise two vital questions. How do companies escape from a sinking cloud? And more importantly, how do they choose a provider who is financially stable and won?t shut down their cloud services in the first place?…

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