You're meeting with your organization's Advisory Board to discuss an upcoming migration of some of your data center's functions to the cloud. This is your company's first foray into the cloud, and the board members understandably have several questions. Some of the board members are supportive of the project, while others are hesitant and even resistant.

Board member $1$:

I don't trust the cloud, plain and simple. We're putting our data on their hardware, but how do we know their hardware is safe? How do we know their services will be available $2417$ like we need?

You:

Cloud providers employ a variety of $\_\_\_\_\_$ techniques to ensure their services are available nearly all the time. Some of the biggest providers guarantee their services are available $99\mathrm{.}99\%$ of the time or better. We can do some research to choose one or more providers that will give us the reliability we need.

Board member $2$:

"One or more providers?" For what reason might we want to use more than one provider? You:

Cloud technologies are changing so quickly, we might decide to use two or even three cloud providers so we can reduce $\_\_\_\_\_.$ This will make it easier to migrate to a different cloud provider in the future if someone else offers cheaper services or better$-$quality service or some kind of new technology that no one else has yet.

Board member $3$:

As you said, cloud computing is changing very quickly these days. Won't this create a tremendous amount of work for your team to keep up with the constant fluctuations in cloud services and features?

You:

The best cloud platforms offer extensive automation services. We can design our cloud with $\_\_\_\_\_$ functions that will continually evaluate our cloud's performance and make automatic changes to improve performance and minimize costs.