There has been some news coverage lately that point to the risks of what happens to your business when cloud services go down. Whilst there’s not a lot you can do in the relatively unlikely scenario that a mainstream cloud provider actually suffers from an ‘outage’, there are a few things you can bear in mind when choosing an Internet based platform on which to run your business.

- Consider whether you want a cloud application or a hosted application. A cloud application will not leave you vulnerable to a single point of failure, but a hosted application will potentially give you greater control and security. An example of this would be the choice between Gmail and a hosted Exchange mail server.

- Read the Service Level Agreements (SLA) of your provider – are you happy with a guarantee that your services will remain running for 99.9%of the time (up to 9 hours of downtime per year), or do you need the promise of 99.99% (under an hour of downtime per year)? What are you entitled to if the provider fails to meet the terms of the SLA?

- Ensure the applications have ‘offline’ modes suited to your business’ needs. Users of some cloud services might not even notice that they’re offline if there’s a problem with the service or the Internet connection as the desktop client carries on working regardless.

- Plan a backup for your business’ internet connection as well – this is as, if not more, likely to be the cause of downtime with cloud applications than a problem at the provider end.

For more information, please see our articles on cloud computing and how to take your business processes online.