Not all cloud vendors are created equal

One of the concerns about using a cloud solution is that you lose control of your software and your data. Peter Hagopian, who writes InformationWeek's Content Management Blog, writes about a hosted software cautionary tale this week. It seems a small hosted software offering, called SoapBlox [1], was hacked last week, and almost forced to shut down to resolve the issue. In the end, the community came together to help company president (and chief bottle washer), Paul Preston and keep the system running.

Up until this happened, Preston was the sole employee at SoapBlox. He has since added a System Administration group with half a dozen people and he has also established a customer service and bug reporting group. It's to his credit that he has responded swiftly to take care of these issues, but it does raise the issue of the team behind your offering.

Preston, by the way, was never trying to pretend he's something he's not. He is by all appearances a good guy offering a solid service. Most of the readers of this newsletter are probably not going to be using SoapBlox as their service of choice, but as Hagopian points out, this situation does raise some substantive issues about choosing a cloud vendor.

Before you go ahead and choose the vendor, check for information about down time. Does the system work most of the time? Who can you call when there is a problem? Who are some of their other customers? And how do they react in a crisis? Do they learn from their crises as Preston clearly has.

By asking these key question before you sign on, you can ensure that you will be taken care of in the event of issues. No service is likely to be 100 percent perfect, just as no in-house installed software is going to be, but you would be wise to do a background check on your vendor before making a decision.

For more information, see:
A hosted content management cautionary tale [2]

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Cloud computing news from FierceContentManagement [3]