Don't take your service providers at their own word. Be awkward and difficult if needs be. Ask for three reference sites all with the same initial. Or in the same district. Better still, ask how many customers they actually have, advises Monkhouse. “If they've got a growth rate of 100 percent year-on-year, they must be doing something right as they'll have to be well organised to manage that expansion successfully,” he says. “It means they will have the right systems in place.” Not everyone agrees with this. We’ve heard tell of one company that kept winning business because it had a great reputation for designing and building datacentres, but that the actual running of the datacentres was a nightmare as this was not their core competence. “You're better off asking to see their testing schedules, or their certificates,” says Monkhouse. SAS70 or SSAE16 or ISO 20001 are all a good indicator of quality processes, he suggests. Better still, ask to see the auditors’ annual report. 4. Can I see your personnel records? If a company’s best assets are its people, then it's odd that so little is done to evaluate the culture within a company. The tendering process is completely skewed, according to Monkhouse, because it tends to be all about speeds and feeds and who can provide the cheapest service. But, surely, the most important quality of a service provider is whether they can come through a severely testing set of circumstances, like adverse weather or a terror attack? 5. Can I see how you fit in? The relationships between all your suppliers can get really complicated. The datacentre might be run by one company, the managed service run by another, the maintenance of the supporting infrastructure (like the heating, cooling, back-up generators and power supplies) coming from somewhere else. “It can get really complicated working out who does what and who takes responsibility,” says Darragh. Everything upstream can go to hell in a handcart, he adds. “The problem is, you only find out if the disaster recovery plan isn't practical when you've had the disaster and you find that you can't recover. By then it's too late.” The penalty clause that allows you not to pay your IaaS provider won't be much compensation when your business has been wiped out by downtime. Before you get involved with them, ask you service provider where they fit in with the network of suppliers. Just as you'd ask what happens if Cable A is pulled or Comms Channel b goes down, you need to know how each company in the supply chain affects the others. And, ultimately, how you’ll recover if they go down.
http://www.cloudpro.co.uk/iaas/cloud-hosting/5012/cloud-hosting-five-questions-you-should-askyour-provider
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