Cloud sales decks love big promises. Reality loves invoices. IBM’s Cost of a Data Breach Report 2024 puts the average global breach cost at $4.88 million, which makes “we’ll fix security later” an expensive personality trait.
Define Your Baseline Requirements
Start with a blunt document that says what you need, what you refuse, and what you can tolerate on a bad day.
This prevents you from picking vibes over fit. If you want a quick place to compare reliable private cloud hosting providers, keep the link handy, but still run the checklist below like a grown-up.
Practical checklist
- Workload profile: VM, Kubernetes, VDI, databases, mixed legacy
- Data class: public, internal, confidential, regulated
- Regions: exact country requirements, residency rules, latency targets
- Availability target: define SLOs (uptime), plus RTO/RPO for recovery
- Capacity plan: current peak, 12–24 month growth, burst policy
- Access model: SSO, MFA, RBAC, break-glass accounts
- Network needs: private links, VPN, BGP, IP allowlists, micro-segmentation
- Tooling: SIEM, EDR, vulnerability scan, CMDB, IaC pipeline support
If the provider cannot mirror your baseline in writing, assume trouble later. Your future incident channel already has enough drama.
Validate Security And Compliance Evidence
Ask for proof, not “trust.” A provider can run a strong program and still explain it poorly, so push for artifacts that an auditor (or a cranky customer) would accept.
What to request
- SOC 2 report scope: security plus availability if you care about uptime (you do). SOC 2 reports cover controls tied to security, availability, processing integrity, confidentiality, or privacy.
- Type matters: Type I covers design at a point in time; Type II covers design and operation across a period. (That second one earns more trust in procurement fights.)
- ISO 27001 certificate and Statement of Applicability (SoA)
- Pen-test summary plus remediation notes (sanitized works)
- Vulnerability management SLA: patch timelines by severity
- Encryption: at-rest and in-transit standards, plus key ownership options
- Tenant isolation model: hypervisor hardening, network segmentation, IAM boundaries
- Security control mapping: align with a control catalog such as NIST SP 800-53 so your team can trace gaps fast
If a provider blocks every question behind “NDA first,” fine, sign it. But still demand real evidence after the signature, not marketing PDFs.
Test Reliability, Performance, And Support
Uptime claims look great until a “minor maintenance event” turns into your Monday.
Reliability comes from process discipline, not hope. Uptime Institute has pointed to procedure failures as a major driver in human-error outages, which means you should evaluate the provider’s operations culture, not only their hardware.
Reliability checklist
- Clear SLO and SLA language: uptime, credits, exclusions, measurement method
- Maintenance policy: notice window, change approvals, rollback plan
- Incident response: time to acknowledge, escalation path, comms cadence
- Support model: 24/7? named TAM? on-call access? severity definitions?
- Historical status: public status page, postmortems, root-cause detail quality
- Performance proof: test environment, benchmark results for CPU, disk IOPS, network
- Noisy neighbor controls: quotas, resource reservations, dedicated hosts if needed
Run a short pilot with production-like traffic. If the provider resists a real test, that tells you something.
Confirm Architecture, Isolation, And Control
Private cloud should give you more control than public cloud, not fewer options with a bigger bill. Ask how the provider builds isolation, how they handle admin access, and how you keep authority over changes.
Architecture checklist
- Platform: VMware, OpenStack, Hyper-V, bare metal, plus version policy
- Control plane access: what you manage vs what they manage, in exact terms
- Identity: SAML/SSO integration, MFA enforcement, least-privilege roles
- Network: separate VRFs/VLANs, firewall ownership, IDS/IPS options
- Dedicated resources: dedicated clusters, dedicated hosts, storage isolation
- Observability: metrics, logs, traces export to your tools
- API/IaC: Terraform support, documented endpoints, drift detection hooks
Also ask the uncomfortable question: “Who can log in as root, and how do you prove it did not happen?” A serious provider has an answer plus audit trails.
Review Data Protection, Backup, And Exit Plans
Backups do not count if restore fails. And “exit later” turns into “hostage now” fast. Treat data protection as a full lifecycle: creation, storage, backup, restore, retention, deletion, migration.
Data checklist
- Backup scope: VM-level, app-consistent snapshots, database-native options
- Restore tests: schedule, evidence, success rate, sample reports
- RPO/RTO commitments: per tier, not one-size-fits-all
- Replication: cross-site, cross-region, plus bandwidth constraints
- Retention and legal hold: policies that match your compliance needs
- Key management: provider-managed vs customer-managed keys, rotation cadence
- Secure deletion: method, verification, timeline after contract end
- Exit plan: data export formats, egress bandwidth, timeline, migration help
Write an “exit runbook” before you sign. It feels pessimistic. It also feels amazing when procurement asks, “What if we switch next year?”
Backup & Restore Testing Strategy | RTO, RPO, Validation & Disaster Recovery Simulation
Price, Contracts, And Governance
Pricing should map to value, not surprises. You do not need the cheapest option. You need predictable costs and clear responsibility.
Contract checklist
- Pricing model: per vCPU/RAM, per host, per VM, per cluster, license pass-through
- Included items: support tier, backups, monitoring, patching, DDoS protection
- Overage rules: burst capacity, storage growth, bandwidth, IPs, snapshots
- SLA credits: automatic vs “file a ticket and beg”
- Liability language: caps, data loss, breach notification duties
- Subprocessors: list, change notice, right to object
- Governance cadence: monthly service review, quarterly risk review, roadmap sync
- Security clauses: audit rights, evidence schedule, incident timelines
Force clarity on shared responsibility. “We handle security” often means “we handle our part.” You need the sentence that defines your part too.