New white paper series: How to choose a Cloud Service Provider

The adoption of cloud services is growing year on year. Cloud computing is undeniably becoming an integral part of long term IT plans for organisations in the UK, whether they've already made the move or are still considering future options. From our perspective, this rise in adoption is a product of two distinct factors: increased awareness of the benefits of cloud services and a greater choice of services available. As a service provider, one of the common concerns we hear is how difficult it has become recently to differentiate between offerings, and assess which ones are best suited to specific business needs.

That is exactly why we've produced a new series of white papers: to dispel the myths, and offer an objective set of steps to finding the right backup, disaster recovery or infrastructure provider. We've broken down our three core offerings into individual components to show how services may look similar but, in reality, capabilities can differ greatly from provider to provider. It's important to be able to differentiate based on your organisational needs. The series includes:

Backup as a Service (BaaS)

Backup isn't sexy, but it is essential. Data is an organisation's most precious asset, and protecting it has, and always will be, a priority for IT managers. Legacy backup systems are failing to keep up with the pace at which data is growing and cloud has become a way to deal with that.

How to choose a BaaS provider explores how, despite being built on exactly the same technologies, offerings from different providers can vary hugely. It looks beyond the technologies used and creates a framework with which to assess the quality and general suitability of backup options available to you.

Disaster Recovery as a Service (DRaaS)

We're in the golden age of disaster recovery. Until now, the cost of traditional DR was prohibitively high. Cloud offers offsite secondary locations at a fraction of the cost of traditional 1:1 reproduction, making recovery much more affordable.

It's becoming much easier for CSPs to add disaster recovery to their service portfolio, and so the choice of offerings available continues to expand. DR is the perfect testing environment for full Infrastructure as a Service – so it's worth getting it right. How to choose a DRaaS provider breaks down the core elements of cloud-based DR into 5 categories with which to assess the suitability of potential providers.

Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS)

The IaaS market isn't just dominated by the big players anymore. Smaller, more specialised providers are able to provide niche markets with differentiated services that were previously unavailable to them due to cost or security reasons, for example.

IaaS offerings are the most inherently different services, as providers are investing in technologies at an uneven pace. Establish the appropriateness of an offering with How to choose an IaaS provider by matching the 8 core categories to your individual organisational needs.

All of our white papers can be found in resources section of the Databarracks website, here.

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