The Hub Commentary_

I would agree network performance is an aspect to consider when setting up and considering deployment options for mass storage.  Another aspect to consider is something I covered in another post on Categorizing your Serivces and which services, inclusive of data, should be put out in the cloud.

In all sourcing situations you need to consider:  security, performance, responsiveness to recovery, and management of the vendor.  A good rule of thumb estimate in managing the provider is 3-7% of the value of the contract.  This is an often overlooked cost in these short sided decisions to reduce costs short term by removing hardware, management and staff potentially.

Storage is well suited for cloud services, however, the service it supports and the criticality to the business is a high consideration.  Commodity data and services are easily the first to be considered for external service providers.  However the more mission critical and data sensitive it becomes to the organization, the more cost prohibitive it becomes to source the service.

Yes, performance is a key to consider, however, I still surmise that the service criticality to the business must also be in the decision process.

How do you decide how to right source your IT services?

Michele

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