So, you’ve identified the services you want to migrate, scoured the market for the lowest rates, made sure all the features of the service match your needs. What next?
How much importance do you place on your data staying on these shores? What about ownership of your own data? Would you prefer to keep that? Have you checked your insurance to see what cover you have if in fact your business critical data is not in the UK?
It is a worthy question to ask. As the race to the cloud scales up, the number of providers is growing exponentially. The main differentiator for attracting customers is price. The most commonly used method of keeping overhead costs down for providers is to use low cost overseas data centres. While I am sure the majority of these data centres offer an excellent service at far lower running costs than their UK equivalent, the fact remains that they are not of this land and therefore many of the law therein.
So what about Safe Harbor agreements, surely they protect my off shore data? The short answer is- perhaps. Some high profile law firms are questioning how robust these laws are when applied to specific regions.
With this in mind, what value do you place on using a company based in the UK which uses UK datacenters? A company which will, if absolutely necessary and security clearance permitting, allow you to visit these datacenters, touch the very servers data resides on?
Fruit Mobile’s differentiator is service. Our Hosted Exchange 2010 and SharePoint 2010 services are 100% fully UK based. The level of support is world away from our larger rivals – if you value a more interpersonal experience, rather than waiting in telephone queues and dealing with multiple agent operators. We won’t lock you into a minimum contract to stay with us, we do this because we are confident you will not want to go anywhere else.
So, before you sign up to your cloud provider, check the small print, check it again and ask the question directly if necessary...’Dude, where’s my data’?
No comments:
Post a Comment