In addition, ensure that the ASP has enough experience with the technology to support your needs, especially for application customization and integration with your company's and your business partners' existing systems. Ideally, the ASP will have strong partnerships with its software vendors and be well-versed in their applications, and can rely on the vendors for additional support. Finally, find out if the ASP will provide the tools to monitor your application remotely and reconfigure it as required. Regarding infrastructure, look at the ASP's ability to scale its operations to support your company's E-business needs as user volume, transaction load, and data storage needs increase over time. Ask for documentation on the ASP' s procedures in areas such as disaster recovery.
Scalability is linked to the architecture of the infrastructure itself.
Ideally, the ASP's architecture should include high-speed connections and a Web application server infrastructure to promote scalability, performance, and fault tolerance. Ask the ASP to provide a network topology or overview that shows its data centers and their infrastructures. In addition, the ASP should provide security at both the application and data levels. Ask about the ASP's approach to network security, firewalls, data transmission encryption, data storage encryption, intrusion detection, virus detection, and virtual private network support. Finally, ensure that the ASP's approach meets your own security requirements and that it keeps your data independent of its other customers.