If you are a Sage 100, Sage CRM, Sage X3, Sage 300 or Sage 500 user, thinking about possibly hosting your business data in the cloud, you might be faced with the conundrum of not knowing which cloud provider to choose.
While cloud computing offers so many benefits, moving your business to the cloud is not a decision that should be made lightly. It’s a decision that should be made with in-depth research into all the options available to your business and even a cost savings analysis to determine if your business should be thinking about utilizing cloud services or not. Before we get into the background of what could possibly make one cloud hosting experience better for Sage than the other, let’s first dive into the cloud hosting options that are available.
In our post on Not All Cloud is Created Equal: Understand Your Cloud Hosting Options, we covered details on the advantages and disadvantages of the different cloud hosting options available for your business. We will briefly touch upon the different hosting services, just to give you a little bit of background on what you should be looking out for when you are talking to cloud hosting providers about hosting Sage in the cloud.
Sage Hosting Options:
Public vs. Private vs. Virtual Private
Public Cloud Hosting for Sage
The first type of cloud hosting option, and possibly the most popular is Public cloud hosting. Public cloud hosting is a much more cost effective option for hosting Sage in the cloud, because the multi-tenant environment allows public cloud providers to provide hosting services at lower prices. Security is always a concern with public cloud hosting environments, as attackers are more likely to target public cloud environments. With that said, most cloud hosting providers today, whether, public or virtual private, are very much concerned with security and are striving to provide secure cloud hosting services. The downside with public cloud hosting for Sage mainly comes with the type of support that you may receive. While public cloud environments are usually easy to set up, it also comes with little to no managed support. Meaning, you may need to have a full IT staff that can support Sage in your hosting environment.
Private Cloud Hosting for Sage
Private cloud hosting although considered a more secure form of cloud hosting, is also quite expensive as involves creating and managing your own virtualized environments. It’s important to note that, private cloud hosting is usually considered more secure because the data lives within your own private environment or firewall and is less likely to be target for cyber attacks. The amount of security involved however, in a private cloud environment is subject to the security measures put in place by the internal IT team that manages the environment. And to truly have a secure environment, you may need to have a team of highly specialized IT professionals to manage all aspects of security and day-to-day management to ensure the smooth running of your environment. For most small to midsize businesses using Sage, building a private cloud environment might not be a cost effective option.
Virtual Private Hosting for Sage
Simply put, virtual private cloud hosting is a fusion of a public cloud environment and a private cloud environment. In a virtual private cloud environment, such as CompuData’s iSySair Virtual Private Cloud, each business has its data isolated and encrypted from other businesses both in-flight and in-transit providing greater sense of security. With this type of setup, security vulnerability or downtime with one business may not affect all other customers. Virtual private cloud hosting provides small to midsize businesses with a cost effective but secure hosting experience. And for your Sage ERP software applications that carry pertinent business information, data security should be a top priority when choosing the cloud provider to go with.
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What Is The Ultimate Cloud Hosting Experience for Sage?
So, now that we’ve covered a bit of the background on your cloud hosting options, the question still remains, what is the ultimate cloud hosting experience for Sage?
The answer to this question really depends on why you are looking to move to the cloud and the type of service that you will like to receive.
Here are some key elements that we think provides the ideal hosting environment for Sage Users:
Managed Hosting and Support for Sage and the Cloud:
For the Sage user moving from an on-premise environment to a cloud environment, you may still want to enjoy the same level of support that you do today with your Sage business partner. In choosing a cloud-hosting provider, it helps to choose a provider that has knowledge and experience with both Sage and cloud hosting to help you gain access to a fully integrated support experience. Our customers that switch from other cloud hosting providers who do not support or implement Sage, sometimes do so due to their frustration playing the “blame game” when trying to get to the root of a technical issue. In your ideal situation, your cloud-hosting provider will also be in-tune with your Sage business application, making it easier to troubleshoot and fix issues when they occur.
Guaranteed Uptime for Sage
Hosting your Sage ERP in the cloud means that you could have your business’s critical data, including financials easily accessibly companywide. However, this accessibility is only as good as how much time your environment stays up and does not experience downtime. When choosing a cloud provider, always ask about the provider’s uptime guarantee. For instance, with our hosting service for Sage, we guarantee an uptime of 99.99% to be conservative, but our actual uptime since 2013 has been 99.9999%. Meaning the actual downtime that we’ve had yearly is less than or equal to 31.6 seconds a year or 2.6 seconds a month, 0.6 seconds weekly and 0.1 seconds daily. Basically, you probably may not even notice the downtime.
Read Also: How to Calculate Your Cloud Cost Savings
Your Hosting Environment Should Meet Industry Security Standards
Security is always an important determining factor when selecting a cloud provider. For certain regulated industries, you will need to make sure that your cloud provider has the needed security certifications to ensure that you are compliant. Examples of certifications to look out for and technology services that are focused on security include; SSAE16 certifications for data centers, PCI compliance, 256-bit encryption for all data in-flight, 24×7 incident monitoring of your Sage server, end-point controls, firewall and antivirus protection, among others.
Backup and Business Continuity
Backup services and a full business continuity or disaster recovery plan, should be one of the deciding factors when thinking about choosing a cloud provider for Sage. Backup and business continuity plans ensure that you business can be up and running in the event of a disaster or downtime. In order to make this possible, cloud hosting companies such as CompuData, replicate data across multiple data centers to ensure data redundancy and data protection. Questions to ask include your cloud-hosting provider include;
- How many data centers will you be backing up my data to?
- Where are these data centers located?
- What’s the security level for each data center?
- What’s the recovery point objective (RPO)?
- What’s the Recovery Time Objective (RTO)?
For instance, at CompuData we have an hour RTO and RPO. Meaning you if you are down we can recover your data up to the last hour of backup in an hour or less.
Billing and Cost
In analyzing the billing and cost for moving into a hosted environment for Sage, don’t just look at the dollar figures for today, but also look at your possible future growth. Look at how much you will be billed based on your projected growth. For example, at CompuData, we bill according to resources used therefore making it easy to for you to pay for only what you need and then scale up, when you want to.
Get Started: Sage Cloud Hosting Price Quote
Where Your Data is Stored?
Knowing where your data is stored should factor into your decision when choosing the best cloud provider for hosting Sage. Basically, you want to make sure that your data is not too far away that recovery could be an issue. For most public hosting services, that use massive data storage centers all over the world, tracking the physical location of your data becomes rather elusive. We are very transparent with where your data is stored physically that is, in Philadelphia, PA and Denver, CO, so you can rest easy.
At the end of the day, the ultimate Sage cloud hosting experience is one that gives you the ability to be free from having to manage your own cloud security, while ensuring data protection. It basically gives you the peace of mind needed to run your business efficiently with easy access to data anytime and anywhere.
Looking at Sage cloud hosting providers? Don’t forget to download your eGuide: 5 Things You Should Consider Before Selecting a Cloud Provider.