Cloud computing has become a catalyst to IT budget and infrastructure cost optimization. In an attempt to align growth verticals, scale without hassle, and make strategic decisions, accounting businesses are migrating their computing workloads, data, and applications to the cloud.
Did you know that 53% of accounting businesses already utilize the cloud in some form?
Therefore, finding the right Cloud Service Provider (CSP) is a crucial business decision that needs to be done carefully. Let’s say you wish to host your QuickBooks Enterprise on the cloud. To use this software without hindrance, a QuickBooks Enterprise hosting provider with experience and knowledge is imperative.
Below we have discussed how you can find the right CSP for your business.
Choose The Right Cloud Service Provider: Some Tips To Consider
The decision of migrating to the cloud is accompanied by finding a CSP that can assist you in complex tasks. Here are some tips to help you choose the right CSP.
-
Total Cost of Ownership
Every CSP has a different costing model, including compute, store, and other managed services. Before moving to any decision, it is imperative to assess the total cost of ownership.
-
Understand the costing model
-
Evaluate services included in the model
-
Include services or additional requirements that might incur costs
Find out the total cost of ownership for each provider and make the right decision.
-
Service Level Agreement
Whenever you are closing the deal with any CSP, you may sign a Service Level Agreement (SLA) with the company. It is a legal agreement that binds both parties. In this agreement, you will find an explanation of the managed service—for example, performance, description of services, and different service levels.
Read the SLA and negotiate on changes required with the CSP.
-
Support
Support issues will not disappear after your infrastructure moves to the cloud service. Figure out the efficiency of the support service offered by the CSP. Understand the support model employed and evaluate if this is aligning with your internal support system. Most reputed service providers offer round-the-clock support for 365 days a year (including public holidays).
To check, call the support service of the CSP and see their caliber to help you through different problems.
-
Data Infrastructure
Accounting businesses create new data internally quite frequently. Due to changing business demands and a dynamic environment, you should migrate data to and from the cloud.
For effective functioning, your data should be managed, packed, and encrypted during transmission.
For example, many CSPs offer 256-bit encryption to secure data being transmitted from and to the cloud. This level of encryption ensures that no third party would be able to extract your data or run a cyberattack during transmission.
Another thing that you can ensure is data encryption of the resting data. This assures the security of your data stored on the cloud instance.
-
Cloud Security
As far as security controls are concerned, your cloud provider should offer a well-defined architecture that maintains your data and applications in the cloud environment. Below are some features you should look for:
-
Identity management: There must be a way to ensure the identity of every person accessing your cloud environment, for instance, authorizing access to an application.
-
Authentication: There should be an authentication system to ensure that only the right people can change or modify data and applications hosted on the cloud.
-
Access Control: Apart from the authorization and authentication discussed in the above pointers, there must be a way to define which employee can access what data, app, or desktop on the cloud.
-
Compliance: As an accounting firm, it is evident that you need to follow certain industry standards and rules. Check if the CSP offers support for PII or ITAR, or GDPR, according to your requirements.
-
Productivity
IT staff needs to manage various issues. When hosting data on the cloud, this burden is released, and your IT team is able to focus on value-based projects. They are better equipped to spend time planning and purchasing the technology necessary for your business—for example, automation, capacity planning, etc.
For this, your Cloud Service Provider must provide load balancing, containerization, and elastic storage. This will reduce the load on the IT team and improve internal productivity.
Further, employees other than the IT staff also experience a boost in productivity. They are able to focus on work without downtime. In-house management is accompanied by undocumented downtime—for example, a system failure or accidental deletion of data. If the CSP offers appropriate uptime, these hindrances are removed, and productivity is improved.
Usually, reputed CSPs offer 99.99% uptime, as per industry standards.
-
Scalability
You need to align the growth verticals of your accounting business. How will you manage peak season demands? How will you increase storage and resources during tax season?
Consider your future growth requirements and talk to your CSP about the flexibility offered. On the cloud, it is easier to scale up or down in real-time. However, everything depends upon the efficiency of your cloud provider. Hence, ask questions related to container orchestration, containerization, and managed databases.
-
Technical Capability
Finally, the technical expertise of the CSP ensures a smooth migration to the cloud:
-
Ease of management, deployment, and upgrade. The CSP must offer support during migration for data management, application data transfer, and upgrades.
-
The CSP must have a formal system for management and monitoring system.
-
A formal infrastructure for logging, testing, requesting, and accepting changes in the system is also a must.
Overall, the CSP must offer complete support during data and app hosting on the cloud.
Conclusion
In 2021, multiple factors, including the pandemic and the fourth industrial revolution, have encouraged accounting businesses to utilize virtual environments. Hence, migrating to the cloud, whether an application or an entire desktop, is crucial.
Cloud services that allow a redundant and scalable environment along with advanced IT infrastructure are necessary. Use the above data to understand managed cloud services and hire the right Cloud Service Provider.
