A public cloud offloads any need to buy hardware or maintain resources onsite and offers an on-demand, pay-per-use solution – that’s why it tends be the lowest-cost option. If you care more about controlling resources and owning infrastructure, private cloud might be the better option. The hybrid model can combine elements from public and private clouds, along with traditional hardware models, in a ratio that makes sense to your organisation and aligns with your IT strategy.

There’s no one-size-fits-all for cloud. You have several service layers, such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) from which to choose, and it all depends on how flexible, secure and simple you want your solution to be. With IaaS, for instance, your Service Provider (SP) will typically handle hardware uptime, but you will be responsible for software downtime. With SaaS, your SP shoulders the burden for most of the security management, and with PaaS, you assume management of security and setup for the middleware and database software. Cloudland is a Service Provider (SP) who will provide the cloud service that best meets your business requirements.

You may need additional managed services or to upgrade other parts of your infrastructure, such as your servers, in the move to the Cloud. Think first of the total picture of your IT strategy to see if Cloudland can help you with other areas.

The Service Provider should provide written service level agreements (SLAs) and you should undertake due diligence to ensure the Service Provider can deliver on its promises. Cloudland will ensure that your SLA should cover your needs and lowers your risk wherever possible. We will work with you to draft an agreement specifically matched to your needs and budget.

A Service Provider with its own in-house security team ensures more effective and timelier trouble shooting. Cloudland has an internal security team and uses regular independent security consultants.

You can find Service Providers that will get your systems transferred and up and running within an hour of a disruptive event – but you’ll have to pay more for it. These terms are usually negotiated in the SLAs, so think about how long you can live without access to certain data and organisation processes; perhaps a day isn’t too long to wait if you can keep down the cost of your cloud.

Areas like service uptime can be hard to measure because they often arise from an issue with the client or end-user side, such as an Internet provider outage, that prevents access to the cloud. Your Service Provider should have monitoring tools in place to support the solution as originally outlined in your SLA.