Stand up and be accountable
Phil Hambly says too many cloud services providers are falling short when it comes to clarifying the lines of responsibility
The market is being flooded with so-called cloud services providers all looking to take advantage of this shift in the market.
We all have to move with the times and change our business models to meet customer demand, but the truth behind many of these services is often different to the marketing hype. Rather than making any actual changes to their business models, these companies are simply rebranding themselves, and overpromising and underdelivering on service.
By promising the earth at apparently competitive prices, customers are at risk and often being left in an extremely vulnerable position. Imagine this all too common scenario: Company A sells a service, but then subcontracts the network to Company B, and then subcontracts the application platform to Company C, which in turn uses a datacentre owned by Company D.
It can be difficult to determine which company is responsible for support. But in this scenario, it almost certainly won't be fully manned round-the-clock support carried out by the contracted provider's in-house engineers.
Too frequently, "24/7 support" turns out to mean call-forwarding to an offshore contact centre, where agents know little about the services being delivered to the individual customer. Without in-house, UK-based, round-the-clock staff, I believe those who call themselves service providers are being economical with the truth.
Unfortunately, these tactics are starting to remind me of the marketing ploys used by some of the low-cost airlines that have been accused of misleading their customers with cheap headline prices and a host of hidden charges.
Outsourcing services to different suppliers may save the provider money, but could cost their customers dearly.
Using many suppliers can result in no actual ownership or accountability. Customers may find they are getting a disjointed service with split responsibility. Worse than that, availability, security and resilience cannot be guaranteed.
The most important thing that needs to be established is who actually owns the network, the datacentres connected to it, the services available and the platforms on which they run.
Ageing infrastructures and fragmented or poorly engineered services put customers at risk of outages. The level of support a provider can offer is also crucial and a reputable cloud service provider should be able to offer true 24x7 manned support.
Owning, managing and monitoring the end-to-end corporate cloud infrastructure is the only way to meaningfully guarantee service level agreements. It's time for any organisation calling itself a cloud services provider to own up and actually make the needed changes to their business model.
It's time that we as an industry start to educate our customers so they can ask the tough questions necessary to ensure they really know what they're getting when they enter the cloud.
Reputable cloud service providers need to be able to truly differentiate themselves from those managed services providers that have simply rebranded in order to protect customers from the kind of outages that have been reported over the past year.
Phil Hambly is a director at InTechnology