CIO: Before You Choose a Cloud Computing Vendor: 8 Questions

27 April, 2010

When you're comparing cloud computing service providers, traditional IT product selection skills may not cut it. Consider these 8 questions for your working checklist.

 CIO  — There are few ways a CIO can look better than by walking in to the CEO's office to offer a sophisticated technology service that answers a desperate business need without requiring large capital expenses or delays before implementation.

"Flip the switch and there's the extra capacity. Pay for what you use and shut it off again," says Steven Peltzman, CIO of the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA) in New York.

Not every cloud provider can do that, of course. Some don't offer the right kind of service. Infrastructure as a service providers such as Amazon Web Services require too much work up front to suit a relatively small IT project.

Other vendors don't offer the right kind of security — the kind a CIO gets from knowing that new cloud provider is a partner to be relied on, not one that will disappear or fail after the CIO talked a large portion of the company into relying on it.

Faced with a project list greater than his budget, MoMA's Peltzman looked into various cloud services as ways to extend MoMA's capacity in specific ways at specific times. Broad-spectrum IaaS services such as Amazon's EC3 had plenty of capacity, but the startup took too long, he says. SaaS providers such as Salesforce.com's online ERP were too function-specific, he adds. Instead, he picked a service from Cloudshare that allowed him to create virtual workgroup environments at will, on Cloudshare's network.

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