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Questions Financial Executives Need To Ask Cloud Services Providers in San Francisco

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The hype surrounding cloud services in San Francisco reached its peak at the dawn of the 21st century. Although hype is good for recognition and exposure, it can be detrimental to the effective adoption of a solution since it comes with misunderstandings, inflated expectations, and disillusionment. As a financial executive, you need a guide for engaging with cloud service providers in a manner that separates propaganda from reality.

To get a clear evaluation of the best practices garnered from the industry, it is important to have answers to the following questions:

Do They Meet Crucial Security and Compliance Requirements?

Since your organization is accountable to clients, business partners, regulators, and employees, you should only use a particular vendor if they have a wide-ranging and technically sound methodology to an in-depth security program. The most effective way of finding out whether your needs for security control are mapped to the provider’s capabilities or not is by asking the following questions:

  • What policies and capabilities for protecting your data does the provider have?
  • Does the provider meet industry-specific security and compliance standards like those established by National Institute of Standards and Technology, Payment Card Industry (PCI), or Security Standards Council?
  • Does the solution comply with the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA)?

As a finance executive, you should ask cloud vendors to offer proof of certifications to verify that they meet and exceed the compliance requirements that your business must meet.

Do They Offer a Broad Disaster Recovery Plan?

All prospective cloud providers need to answer the following questions when it comes to disaster recovery:

  • Do they have a disaster recovery plan?
  • Do they test the recovery plan regularly?
  • Does their disaster recovery work?

When it comes to disaster, your organization’s recovery point objective (RPO) must be near real time, while your recovery time objective (RTO) will change depending on the likelihood of an actual disaster. The importance of your cloud provider’s capability to handle a disaster is as relevant as your vendor’s cloud computing infrastructure.

Will the Solution Be Configured to Meet My Needs?

To meet the specific needs of particular businesses, software applications require significant implementation services. These capabilities are provided by cloud-based solutions through configuration instead of custom code development. Since the economic model of cloud providers works best when they offer these capabilities to the majority of their clients, you should look to make the system specific to your organization through configuration instead of customization.

How Visible is The Audit Trail Process?

It is important that your organization be able to monitor and track usage activity when security breaches occur. As a finance executive, you should ask the vendors of cloud services in San Francisco how an activity is tracked in log files and whether you can get access to the log files or not. Although auditing log files does not seem to be preventative when compared to encryption and data segmentation, it is a very important security measure in case of a breach.

As the need to balance consumer expectations with shrinking budgets increases, more and more businesses are turning to cloud services in San Francisco. At OneClick Solutions Group, we understand that there is a subtle sense of balance between safety risks, the effectiveness of shared assets, and cost implications. Contact us today and let us help you with your cloud needs.

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