Is your business in the cloud with a trusted supplier?

The cloud can also offer organisations load balancing, environmental consistency and guarantees, and increased resilience and back-ups options.

More and more businesses are choosing to turn to the cloud and therefore there has been an increase in the demand for trusted cloud providers. A supplier of the cloud can facilitate the move from on-premises locations to the cloud and also help with the on-going management of application support and cloud maintenance.

However, with this becoming a rapidly growing industry, how do you know that your business is on the cloud with a trusted and experience supplier?

Multiple network options
The internet offers a multi-path network capability so that, if any one part of the internet was to go down there is the capability for alternative paths to be taken by the information, meaning that availability remains. A trusted and reputable cloud supplier will use multiple networks to ensure high availability at all times. Your cloud provider should have multiple network providers and also, where possible, multiple datacentre facilities to ensure functional availability.

Failover
A trusted cloud provider will also have a backup plan if there is a failure in the function chain. Providers should have multiple instances of a function running so that should a failover occur, the functions can continue to run on a different network.

This will require regular maintenance of certain network information, but a reputable cloud supplier should be doing this anyway. Viatel’s private cloud guarantees availability of your cloud container at any time as they are custom built virtual environmentsdesigned around your business’s needs.

Availability for high priority data
The general performance across the internet is difficult to predict and guarantee. Data can travel any route it wants and so can take varying amounts of time to reach its destination. A trusted cloud provider will offer priority of service using services such as multi-protocol labelling service. For example, A quality utility cloud offers a range of application stacks which allows you to enable high availability for important apps. Using direct connecting services, such as dedicated lines, where core functions are concerned can help to ensure that you will be able to access important data whenever you need to.

Security
With all of your company data being stored electronically on the cloud, a trusted supplier such as Viatel must ensure that they provide data-leak prevention, content inspection and encryption services to ensure that your company data remains safe.

Full contextuality, audit trails and cloud-based intrusion detection capabilities are essential for a trusted cloud supplier to reduce the risk of any part of your cloud chain being hijacked by hackers. While you should always use a cloud supplier who offers these services, you should remember that as the information belongs to your business, and the overall responsibility for its security lies with you.

The cloud has innovated and changed how many companies choose to do business in this modern age. The promises and future possibilities that the cloud holds will help to change the face of data storage and file sharing within the business sector.

However, the cloud needs a solid foundation on which to perform to its best and this will depend heavily on the network it relies on. Second rate cloud suppliers will only provide poor performance, security and availability. It is essential that you use and experience and trusted cloud provider for your business to help you make the most of the cloud’s benefits and to ensure that your business isn’t slowed down in an industry where being able to keep up is the key to success.