Right tools needed when business processes meet the cloud

Stephen Withers
Tuesday, 16 June 2009 12:47

Business IT - Technology

How can IT staff provide end users with assurance that their business transactions will be handled reliably when part of the process is handled in the cloud?

When an organisation applies cloud computing to business transactions, the IT staff will still get the blame when things go wrong, warns Dan Foody, vice president of infrastructure products at Progress Software.

This means they need visibility into their providers' systems (and their providers' providers' systems and so on down the chain) if they are to do a good job for their users.

"You have to worry about your providers' providers," he says. Are your providers really on top of the situation, or are they taking their providers (eg, hosting or billing services) on trust?

It's "a complex chain that organisations don't usually worry about," says Foody, suggesting that they must be ready to do due diligence on the risks involved rather than simply relying on what the contract says.

Most contracts only make the provider liable for the cost of the service not delivered during an outage, not the losses that occur as a result of the service being unavailable.

It's not a contractual problem, it's about risk, he explains.

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