Equalizing The Cloud Providers: Questions Every Microsoft Dynamics Customer Should Ask

Everywhere you turn today, a different company is offering "Solutions in the Cloud:" kids, adults, heck -  even my grandmother stores her photos in the cloud.

So you've gone through and evaluated your options, and you believe that moving your Microsoft Dynamics ERP solution to the cloud is the right choice for your organization. Congratulations, you're well on your way! But now you have two key decisions to make: How am I going to get there, and where, exactly, is "there"?

These are incredibly important questions, because if you answer them incorrectly or don't choose the right Cloud Service Provider (CSP), you could be opening your organization to severe risks - risks like slow performance, down time, data exposure, or even worse, data loss.  Imagine the effects of losing everything you have entered into your CRM or ERP system.  What would you do if tomorrow morning you walked into your office and didn't have any of your customer data, no invoices, no purchase orders, nada?  According to global research firm Gartner, of the top 100 Cloud Service Providers in the market today, 25% of them will not be in business in 2015.  It reminds you of the old term "Buyer Beware."  

How do you perform your due diligence to mitigate some of these risks? Here are essential questions that you should ask your prospective cloud provider:

1) Is the solution that the cloud provider is offering multi-tenant or single-tenant?

This question is probably the most important when we discussing cloud enabling business applications such as Dynamics ERP or CRM.  Some services, e-mail for example, lend themselves to multi-tenant environments.  They allow for the provider to logically segment each customer's data so they aren't exposed to one another.  Accounting and ERP, on the other ...