Enterprise cloud users need to take steps up front in the relationship to ensure that their needs will be taken care of in the event of problems. They provided the following checklist to follow before signing on with a cloud provider, and urge enterprises to ask the following questions before signing

Engagement Model

1. Can you provide at least three blind references?

2. Can you state our business problem?

Flexibility

1. Can I add and delete services as needed?

2. What is the brokers' percentage of revenue from each cloud platform?

3. Do your security, compliance, database and other services work across cloud platforms?

Availability

1. When and how liong was your last sustained cloud wide outage?

2. Is the proposed architecture sufficiently diversified to mitigate risk?

3. How is your availability service level agreement (SLA) superior to your competitors?

Manageability

1. Do you have a single pane of glass to manage it all?

2. Do you offer single bill for all services?

3. Do you have a single monitoring and alerting platform?

Discoverability

1. What are your published recovery stats?

2. Do you establish SLAs with real penalties for failure?

3. How many instances or virtual machines do you have under replication?

4. What hypervisor is being used?

Security and Compliance

1. What industry certifications you have?

2. Do your services such as security and database services, work across platforms?

Support

1. How is your support team structured and bonused?

2. Do you have any quality measurement programs?

3. What is your emergency response process?

4. What is your post-emergency response process? (Root cause analysis

5. How to encrypt Data?

6. How to encrypt Key?

7. Are you following Certifications for data protection?

8. How do you replicate Data?

9. How do you control Data acess?

10. How do you secure end user devices?

11. How do you secure Authentication?

12. How do you Segerate customer data?

13. DO you kep an activity history?

14. Can you protect data as you increase workload?

15. What is the right prespective?

16. What is the right pace for cloud adoption?

17. Whats the right moddel for cloud adoption?

18. What is the right organizationalstructure for your cloud?

19. Who are the right patners for your cloud strategy/

20. What is the right development community for cloud?

21. What are the right user community for your cloud?

22. What are the right objectives?

It's important to "work with established vendors who have SLAs that you agree with and have skin in the game. Look for cloud providers who layer services across cloud platforms

Once again make sure the service level agreements with cloud providers are crafted so that “when they are down, it should hurt them as much as it hurts you."