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2019 Buyer's Guide to Accounting and Financial So ware 10 2. Operational track record. Your chosen vendor isn't merely developing and licensing so ware. They're managing the financial systems that run your business—which makes the partnership strategic for you. Find out how your vendor conducts business. What's the cultural fit with your company? What standards do they pursue? Where are the applications physically being run? 3. Data ownership. Ensure that it is unambiguous that you own your own data and can obtain a copy of your data (for an appropriate fee) if your relationship ends. You'll also want an agreement for appropriate assistance in migrating away from the vendor should you ever decide to leave� 4. Infrastructure and security. Most cloud-computing vendors partner with elite data center providers that provide the backbone to their offerings. Find out who those partners are. Where are the data centers located? What are the business-continuity contingencies? What security standards have they adopted? Can they deliver guaranteed and appropriate levels of uptime? How do they prevent, detect, and remediate physical and network security breaches? Thoroughly evaluate each vendor's network operations center and technology infrastructure� 5. ROI/TCO. Although the financial models can vary significantly, the total cost of ownership is typically far lower for cloud-computing systems than it is for on-premises and hosted systems. Take the time to carefully structure proper ROI scenarios and timelines to determine the investments and payback periods. The only ongoing costs should be monthly fees for the so ware subscription, training, and configuration. If you are comparing cloud to on-premises, remember that so ware licensing for an on-premises solution actually makes up a very small percentage of its total cost. Additional ongoing costs may include customization, hardware, IT personnel, maintenance, training, tuning, customizations, network maintenance, and much more. And that translates into a far more difficult investment hurdle. What's more, cloud computing costs are taken entirely from OPEX, whereas on-premises deployments typically include even larger OPEX plus significant CAPEX investments. (See Figure 1�) Ensure your vendor can do a be er job at running your system than you can—and that it will keep up the good work, month a er month. Figure 1