Business relationships are important. You have done your homework. You have researched and tested several solutions and settled on one that you thought was a great cloud backup vendor. Before you picked this company, you considered several factors, such as: technology, experience, financial status, reputation, security, compliance, support, certification, scalability, and trust. But, now, the vendor is taking it all for granted and is providing you with substandard services, resulting in not so good relationship.
Is your relationship with your cloud backup vendor healthy? If your business relationship starts to show some signs of stress, chances are the relationship will die at one point. Perhaps, it is time for you to gauge your business relationship. If you notice any or all of the following points, you might be in a bad relationship:
1/ Data Backup – the company doesn’t backup all of your data across all operating systems, and on mobile devices. Are you using various backup solutions across operating systems (iOS, Windows, etc.) and across mobile devices?
2/ Appliance – Is the vendor appliance centric? Do you find yourself spending more than what you planned for appliances? Is the vendor requesting you to acquire additional appliances to match with your backed up data? Relying heavily on appliances might not be an ideal solution. Cloud centric solutions, however, offer unlimited scaling when your data grows. Is your data being tethered to an appliance instead, and as a result, forcing you to delete data and/or buy bigger appliance to gain extra space for your growing data?
3/ SLA – Service Level Agreements are very important. SLAs have a purpose and that is why a great deal of effort is put into preparing them. Does the vendor execute per signed and approved SLA?
4/ Price – the price the vendor is charging you varies all the time, and is complicated, and you can not figure out how the pricing model works. Is it per GB of raw or compressed data? Do you get credit for not recovering data, say, in the past one year?
5/ BLM – Does your vendor treats all data the same and back them all up in the same vault? Keep in mind that all data has the same value. The older a data gets, the less important it becomes. So, mission-critical data should be stored separately with clearly defined RTO and RPO while less important data should be stored in less expensive vaults. Intelligent software have the ability to automatically segment the data into these two tiers.
If you decide to move your services to a new vendor, make sure that you don’t end up with the same problems as the vendor you just switched from. Insist on asking the new vendor to help with the data migration, at least consultation help. Remember that choosing a cloud backup service provider is not a simple task; and the vendor you choose could end up causing you to go out of business.
In Part II, we will discuss other five factors that affect your relationship with your vendor, such as bandwidth throttling; data centre location; vendor lock-in; DRaaS; and periodic vendor research results.
