By Adam Wray, CEO, CenturyLink Cloud Who should you fill your board member seat? An individual who will advance your company’s strategic vision and ability to execute. Filling an outside board member seat is a critical step at any stage of a company’s growth, but especially critical for an earlier stage company. While the temptation may be to court board members with broad industry name recognition, or company associations, this is only one of many variables to consider when targeting a new board member (and candidly of lower priority than several others). In beginning a search, factor what requisite expertise and knowledge are most valuable to leverage and how that background will integrate and complement your existing board. When we looked to expand our board to bring in another outside director, we developed a definitive set of skills and experience we felt would be accretive to our board, versus overlapping. Our two existing directors have great operational and venture finance backgrounds, so we were looking for was experience that could bring new and diverse insights, in particular around our core business, cloud computing. We found what we were looking for in Mark Adams, chief development officer of Equinix, Inc., a...

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Note: Added in the text of the original 2011 article published at TechRepublic.

Beyond the business challenges of serving customers in new ways online, independent software vendors (ISVs) planning to take their applications online must make critical architectural and platform choices to ensure they deliver the best customer experience possible. Consider these 10 things before you make the move.

1: How much do you really need to rebuild?

Must you rewrite your application to achieve a multi-tenancy application layer — a costly undertaking — or are there easier and less expensive ways to achieve multi-tenancy in the cloud?

2: What kind of uptime and disaster recovery do your end customers need?

Many cloud environments are built for economy and scale but as we’ve seen recently, they lack the fault tolerance and redundancy to enable you to pass an enterprise level SLA to your customers. Make sure that your cloud platform is built for the enterprise — five 9s availability SLAs should cover not only servers but also network and storage (all the layers to power the full environment). In addition, when outages happen, ensure that the mean time to recovery track record is strong. How fast the cloud can recover is key.

3: How can you...

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CenturyLink Cloud Enterprise Cloud Platform’s Performance, Implementation and Disaster Recovery Capabilities Leverage NetApp Solutions

BELLEVUE, Wash.—June 15, 2011—CenturyLink Cloud, the enterprise cloud company, today announced it is a Gold-level member in the NetApp Partner Program for Service Providers. Long coupled with flexible and efficient NetApp® storage and data management solutions, CenturyLink Cloud’s agile, self-optimizing enterprise cloud platform helps enterprises confidently run mission-critical, production applications in the cloud. CenturyLink Cloud first architected its enterprise cloud platform to include NetApp as part of its infrastructure in 2007, immediately reducing backup on an entire data center from 24 hours to one hour and cutting time to restore customer data from 3.5 days to under an hour. Now an official Gold-level member of the new Partner Program for Service Providers, CenturyLink Cloud will receive additional storage expertise, resources and best practices from NetApp that will enable the company to continue to meet the unique performance, implementation and disaster recovery needs of enterprise cloud-based applications and services.

Our mission is to provide our customers with an enterprise-grade cloud platform with the SLAs, security and built-in disaster recovery they require,” said Adam Wray, chief executive officer, CenturyLink Cloud. “From the get-go, the secure multi-tenant architecture we built leveraging...

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