Connor Brooke
Making the move to a shared cloud hosting environment presents businesses with a number of challenges relating to governance, compliance, risk management, and availability. The following three factors are considered to be of utmost importance if a ERP cloud hosting facility is to provide clients with a quality environment in which to store and manage data.
Accessibility
Consistent availability should be of major concern in any cloud hosting environment. You need to be confident that your employees will be able to access applications and data stored in your hosting environment from anywhere at any time. Without this capability, the services are useless to your company.
To ensure accessibility, be sure to choose an ERP cloud hosting provider who continuously manages connections to its network with high availability monitoring solutions. These providers should follow established and proven best practices, such as investing in and undergoing an annual SOC 2 Type audit.
Performance
You should expect to receive the highest levels of performance from your chosen ERP cloud hosting facility. This is mainly determined by how the hosting environment is accessed and how this access is shared; however, only when this is specified correctly can quality performance be guaranteed.
Leading ERP cloud hosting providers work closely with their Hosting Facility to ensure they conform to Telco Standards. These include; Telcordia/Bellcore GR-1275 standards, IEEE Standard 383, National Electric Code, and Underwriters Laboratories Standard UL 94.
Security
There is a critical need to feel assured that your company’s data and applications are safe and secure when choosing an ERP cloud hosting provider. Although data is stored in a “cloud,” this is really only a concept, as in reality the procedure does involve physical resources. Public and shared clouds even house data from multiple companies in the same location and physical systems. Much like online networks and physical locations, cloud hosting facilities must be securely built and kept under constant observation to monitor for human and environmental threats.
Considerations for security include:
- Access – Whether access is available on a 24-hour basis, and what methods are used to access the physical system (finger print scans, man traps, and the types of locks on cabinets)
- Monitoring — The number and placement of recording cameras in and outside the building, how often these are monitored, and which are given constant observation
- Cooling — The capacity of cooling and amount of cooling with generator backup
- Power — What service is providing power, the details of the contracts of vendors supplying fuel (whether the service is on-demand, and the number of vendors), and fire suppression action procedures
If your company is seriously considering a move to an ERP cloud hosting facility, it may be worthwhile to assess the services offered against your own organization’s IT risk criteria. You should take into account critical assets, potential vulnerabilities and threats to these assets in order to form a risk-mitigation strategy. Taking such an approach is especially important when contemplating a move to an ERP cloud hosted environment where you lack the physical control of IT infrastructure given the environment is managed by a third party.
Another strategy, suggested by PCI Security Standards, is to evaluate the security needs of all types of information that is being migrated. If the data security processes of your provider are not clearly stated, you can expect your data to be at a higher risk of being unwittingly exposed to unwarranted risks that could result in losses or inappropriate disclosure.
Lastly, it is essential that your provider inform you if there has been an incident, issue, or breach in the environment that could in any way affect data. The best ERP cloud hosting facilities require clients to notify them within a brief time of the occurrence.
When choosing an ERP cloud hosting facility, ensure that all the above criteria is covered so that you can feel confident your access is appropriate, performance is excellent, and data is secure.
This article was written for Business 2 Community by Connor Brooke.
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Great article. Security has always been an issue. Check out this article! http://www.acumatica.com/blog/4-reasons-why-the-erp-dream-can-finally-be-realized