Cloud Backup Services Can Tell You a Lot

Use this as an early way of learning about cloud providers. Prices have become very competitive, getting well below $1 per gigabyte per month.

Look for specific metrics, such as guarantees that they can restore specific applications in under eight hours/four hours/one hour.

Generally, you get what you pay for. This holds true in the cloud-service world as well as in most other businesses. Keep this in mind when selecting a provider and a service plan.

Before you risk deploying existing apps in the cloud, use cloud disaster recovery and the DR test options that come with it to check running those apps in the cloud.

When you’ve used cloud DR to test the apps and you want to upgrade your infrastructure, consider migrating some of your apps to the cloud.

Protect apps running on one cloud with a DR to another cloud; as we have seen on occasion with Amazon and others, their clouds do go down.

Look for cloud platforms that don’t require you to change your on-premise systems. For example, don’t get locked into having on-premise storage devices that only work with one cloud provider.

The battle between Amazon, VMware, Microsoft and others to become the dominant cloud operating system is still in its early days. Try to avoid developing apps that only run on a single cloud OS.

As you migrate from on-premise to public cloud and between public clouds, you will need to choose among the different management tools that come with the new cloud providers.

Cloud is all about driving down costs while also driving up the performance and availability of your applications. While using multiple cloud management tools will mean there is still a considerable management cost, expect this to come down as the cloud management tools evolve.