While the main benefits of cloud computing – decreased cost and ease of management – started the widespread interest in this technology, its limitations, including security concerns and losing control over applications, made large enterprises wary. This is rapidly changing as enterprises have access to Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) offerings from providers who have an in-depth knowledge of how to best leverage infrastructure services for enterprise cloud applications. The pace of change in the cloud computing industry rivals the intensive change seen at the start of the Internet era. Cloud providers are innovating rapidly and new services and concepts are being announced daily. With so many complex moving parts, choosing the right enterprise cloud provider can be challenging.

This white paper provides a comprehensive evaluation framework for selecting an enterprise cloud provider for your organization. Because the cloud is a fully integrated and highly dependent part of the enterprise’s IT infrastructure, it cannot be evaluated as a standalone feature set. As a result, the framework takes a complete view of enterprise requirements, giving you the questions you need to ask cloud vendors (and yourself) around cloud security, support, network infrastructure, control and user management, SLAs, cloud operations and resource allocation, and more.