Five Things Your Cloud Provider Should NOT Say To You

Ah, the promise of the cloud: pure uptime, low risk, ease of use and assuring messages that you’ll never again have to worry. For many organizations, these promises have yet to be fully realized. If you feel like the cloud ‘noise’ you are hearing in the market is contradictory to your reality, you have fallen victim to some messages that don’t accurately represent the promise of the cloud.  In recent months, my inbox has been full of communications from cloud and managed service providers that have me shaking my head.

You deserve ‘straight talk’ from your cloud provider about your risk, your costs, security, uptime and the processes that are in place to protect your mission-critical applications. And in that light, here are the top five messages that are most often misrepresented, and Concerto’s response to each:
 

1. They may try to scare you with the fact that hurricane season is coming:

You already know that.  I wonder how many times someone calls and says “Oh, wow! Thank you!  I had no idea hurricanes hit Florida and I am completely unprepared - please help me.”

Concerto’s Response:  You’re protected 24x7x365. If there’s an issue in a datacenter – we have 3 more. Plus, the majority of our customers have redundancy and failover to another geographically-dispersed data center included as part of their platform (with no upcharges for the service, I might add).

2. They may offer you a ‘free’ assessment:

The old adage prevails; namely, ‘nothing comes for free.’  Or, ‘You get what you pay for.’ Essentially this is simply a sales rep bringing along a subject matter expert to scope and qualify the opportunity in front of them.

Concerto’s Response: A first meeting to listen and understand an initial summary of technical and business challenges is just that – a meeting.  A thorough ‘assessment’ of one’s readiness for the cloud would be a much more significant session complete with some homework and preparation. Valuable expertise and deliverables are worth charging – and paying for. 

3. They may tell you there is an imminent threat – or even better – that there’s already a security hack or some crazy new virus that can’t be contained:

Often customers will make a quick and hasty decision due to the perception and fear of something eventually going wrong.  While this is certainly valid – there’s also the reality of cyber security and new threats that nobody can emphatically state can be contained. 

Concerto’s Response: People, process, technology and continued vigilance stop or contain threats.  We also do not advocate stating that no threat will ever get through.  Our focus is ensuring that our incidence response and mitigation strategy is best in the industry, along with a highly secure platform.  

4. They may tell you they can offer a service that is ridiculously cheap: 

(Of course there’s always an asterisk – and no one likes the asterisk.) :/

Concerto’s Response: Our management and cloud solutions are award-winning.  We’re not likely to be cheaper than the “asterisk” guys, but we put a great focus on appropriately sizing cloud environments and delivering flat-rate, predictable invoices. Do not be fooled: an initial cost may spiral upward as time with that provider moves forward.  

5. They may offer 100% uptime:

Well, they’re lying. The power grid can’t guarantee 100% uptime, so how could anyone promise the same?  

Concerto’s Response:  We have one of the best SLAs in the industry, and we promise that we can deliver 99.99% – no more than 4 and a half minutes per month of downtime for your application. And we don’t play reindeer games by creating a layered or differentiated service level agreement.  If your application on our platform is down – we pay, automatically. Deploying an application in a cloud takes time and investment. A long-term relationship with a cloud provider should have the hallmarks of trust and honesty, not wasting your time – or keep you loyal by leveraging scare tactics.  

If you’d like some straight talk about your mission-critical applications and assessing your risk or reliability, learn more about our Cloud Advisory Services.