Moving to cloud based solutions is the ongoing market trend in the present scenario. Right from the small businesses to the medium and large ones, everyone is migrating to cloud based environment, and there are considerable reasons for that. Moving all your business operations like document storage and email to cloud helps streamline the workflow, cut the operational costs and also eliminate the need to hire an in-house IT team. A cloud based environment also makes it easier for the remote employees to access the important information, collaborate over the web and communicate with the other team members. Most importantly, investing in a cloud environment allows the business owners to concentrate on the core business areas.

While the benefits of shifting to a cloud environment are quite obvious, it’s important to choose the right service provider. If you fail to choose a service provider who is extremely reliable and efficient, it might cause damage to your business in the long run. This is why it’s important to choose a cloud service provider very carefully. In case you are going to sign the deal with a cloud service provider for the first time, and not feeling very confident, consider taking a look at the following questions. Asking these questions to the service provider might help you make the right selection –

• What is your pricing structure? – Make sure you pay only for what you are actually using. There are many service providers who design the plans in a way so that you can’t customize it according to your requirement. Be sure to avoid plans like these and opt for a model that offers only those features that you need the most for your business. The pricing scheme should be based on a pay as you go model and it should also have the ability to add services, as and when needed.

• Where is the data centre located? – The location of the data centre determines how safe and secure all your data will be. Remember that you are going to store your mission critical data with the service provider and hence, it’s your responsibility to check whether or not the data centre is located in a secure environment. Make sure the area where the data centre is located is not easily accessible and has been protected with proper security measures.

• How secure is the model? – Security should be one of the most important factors that you should consider while choosing a cloud service provider. Make sure the service provider follows standard security measures and also update those measures consistently. You should ensure that you are perfectly comfortable with the cloud provider’s approach to security. You should look for measures that are used for anti-virus detection, firewalls, data encryption, multi-user authentication and routine security audits. Also don’t forget to check whether or not the cloud provider performs employee background verification.

These are some of the most important questions that you should ask while choosing a cloud service provider. Apart from these, you should also find out about their disaster recovery measures.