Understand cloud SLAs to protect critical biz processes

Businesses need to take a closer look at the service level agreements signed with their cloud providers previously inking a contract, industry watchers advise, particularly afterwards the recent outage of Amazon Web Services' Elastic Compute Cloud which impacted a number of high-profile clients.

Morris urged companies, particularly small and midsize businesses, to understand what is and is not covered by the contract, as part of their pre-contract due diligence process.

Rackspace Hosting's Asia-Pacific managing director, Jim Fagan, concurred. He told ZDNet Asia in an e-mail that every cloud provider offers differing levels of redundancy, reliability and SLAs, and businesses should first conduct their own due diligence to determine if the provider is living up to its promises and offering SLAs to support its guarantees.

The AWS outage

With regard to the AWS outage, he noted that during the incident highlighted risks associated with cloud computing, it as well showed examples of how cloud systems to tell the truth "created a more redundant and stable platform" in other words difficult to achieve in a traditional datacenter environment.

"There were many companies that utilized the elasticity and cost advantages of cloud computing to architect a robust disaster recovery plan which allowed them not to be affected by the outage," he said.

Deploying business backupsMeanwhile, Akihiro Okada, president of Fujitsu's cloud business support unit, said infrastructure-as-a-service vendors ought to have the "same level of design, construction and maintenance in highly-reliable cloud platforms that are on par with standard, on-premise data centers".