- Are You Comfortable with the ASP's Approach to Major Data Center Issues Such as Backup, Disaster-Proofing, and Data and Physical Security?
- Can the ASP Provide the Type of Secure Broadband Network that Best Suits Your Requirements?
- Is the ASP's IT Infrastructure Scalable Enough to Accommodate Your Company's Growth or Variations in Activity?
- Do You Prefer that an Outside Party Remotely Monitor All the ASP's Facilities (Such as Data Centers) and Security Equipment (Such as Firewalls)?
- Do You Require that the Application You Lease Be Extensively Customized?
- Do You Need Accelerated Deployment of the Hosted Application?
- Which, If Any, of these Hosted Enabling Technologies Do You Need, and Why?
- What Extent of Technical Support and Customer Service Do You Require?
- Which ASP Pricing Model Best Meets Your Company's Activity Patterns—Does the ASP Offer that Model?
- Does the ASP's Standard Service Level Agreement (SLA) Meet Your Needs? If Not, Will the ASP Change It, and How Much Does It Charge to Change It?
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2. Can the ASP Provide the Type of Secure Broadband Network that Best Suits Your Requirements?
Customers need one of three types of broadband network. If they require only point-to-point connectivity, they'll use leased lines. These lines must be leased 24/7 and per a flat rate, so usage-based pricing is not possible. But they are innately secure because only one customer leases them. If customers require any-to-any connectivity, they'll use Private WANs or Virtual Private Networks (VPNs). Private WANs are costly to build, but providers lease them to multiple customers—in sharing them, customers defray costs, but can still maintain transmission security through security techniques such as encryption and authentication. But, like leased lines, they are leased per a flat rate, so customers pay for bandwidth they may never use. VPNs leverage the Internet's infrastructure, so they are cheaper to build and less expensive to lease. Customers can also share one provider's VPN—and usually do. And, because all transmissions on a VPN proceed through secure tunnels through the Internet, VPNs are inherently secure. VPNs also can accommodate advanced, higher-performing networking technologies such as Asynchronous Transfer Mode (ATM) that allow for usage-based pricing and what's known as different "quality of service" for different customers. So while paying less, with VPNs customers get high-performance, and secure and pervasive connectivity.