Firms 'should get service level agreement' from cloud

Businesses that want to use cloud servers should ensure that they get a service level agreement from their provider, according to an IT services firm.

Hadrian James, technology manager at Compuware, warned that cloud providers can have many clients using the same hardware - meaning there is a danger that performance could suffer.

To avoid this, a service level should be agreed on, but monitoring of the system must then take place.

This should be done in two places - first, from within the company and second, from the provider itself.

"They will have a monitoring solution inside their framework in their infrastructure and they should be able to publish that out to you and say 'right, these are the people who have been using the service from your company, this is the amount of time it's taken them to execute the particular transactions'," he said.

Cloud technology - where businesses use third-party infrastructure for data storage and other services - is becoming popular in the UK, according to a study last month from Citrix.

The research found that two out of three UK firms have taken it up in some way.