“IT services are becoming more about risk management than technical ability, particularly as organizations adopt cloud services,” writes Scott Lowe in his latest Professional Alert. In line with that thought, and as a follow on to his last Alert defining five important questions CIOs should ask internally before adopting cloud services, Lowe discusses five vital questions that CIOs should ask any prospective Cloud service providers before signing a contract:

The first focuses on one of the main issues of using the Cloud — SLAs: “What is your service level interruption and restoration history and how were root cause defects identified and corrected?” Every service provider has outages from time to time. The question is how fast did they fix them, and how aggressive are they in identifying and rectifying root causes. The latter, Lowe writes, show how seriously the provider takes meeting SLAs and maintaining uptime.

The second speaks to the financial issues: “What is your pricing structure and do you have a way that we can estimate actual ongoing costs?” Basically moving to the Cloud trades capex costs for opex, and the expectation is that the cloud service will be less expensive overall than running the service in house. But even so, IT still has to budget for that cost every month. Cloud services charge on an “on demand” model similar to traditional utilities, but their cost structure is much more complicated than that of a utility, Lowe writes. “You will pay for data at rest, data in transit, bandwidth, processing cycles, and more.” This complexity is one reason some CIOs avoid the cloud, and they need a way to make reasonably accurate estimates of monthly charges for budgeting.

The third brings up another important issue, security: “What measures do you take to protect my services from both threats from outside your infrastructure as well as from other tenants?” Security is a major concern, particularly when a CIO is going to allow vital company data out onto a service on the Internet.

The fourth is: “What’s my “out” if it becomes necessary?” CIOs may need to terminate service contracts early for any number of reasons, from poor service to changing business needs. It is always important to fully understand what is involved and what charges will be levied, for instance for returning large databases, when a contract termination is necessary.

Finally, the fifth question speaks to a major technical issue: How do the provider’s services integrate with remaining on-premises systems? Integration is a major ongoing issue of cloud services that is being solved through open standards, but each service is different, and CIOs need to be sure that they can maintain the integration they need without major efforts with the specific services they are considering.

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