For the past 5 years cloud services have grown to be ubiquitous, secure and high-performance. Yet just yesterday I was talking to a friend who was lamenting the decision he had to make at work regarding deploying a Microsoft Project server on AWS or Azure. He needed to provide access to team members from two organisations and his company would not allow external people to access their on-premise project server. The cloud is the only way to go for such an application. But while that's so obvious there are some caveats that need to be observed. 

It's important that my friend select a cloud service provider (CSP) appropriately. He needs to evaluate prospective suppliers from a operational risk viewpoint - can you get your files back when you part ways with the CSP, technical viewpoint - does the CSP provide adequate security and a legal point of view - are the licence terms suitable? 

Then a decision needs to be made on the identity service to authenticate users to the site. Is an access control list going to be maintained on the CSP's site (bad), will there be a synchonisation to AD (not much better) or will the company establish an identity provider service in the Cloud? In this instance a cloud-based federation service to which the other company can interface would be a good idea.

The technolgy is here folks - let's just use it.

Thx.

Graham