Cloud has stopped being a meaningful differentiator, since nearly everything is built this way. What the phrase should prompt is a set of specific questions about cost behaviour, how much of the provider's proprietary surface you adopt, and who is accountable for the parts of security that are yours rather than the provider's.
In a cloud web application, cost behaviour is an architectural decision
Cloud costs scale with usage in ways that can be excellent or ruinous depending on design. Data transfer out, per request charges, always on resources for intermittent workloads and managed services priced per operation all add up quietly. Ask a bidder to model the monthly cost at your expected and at ten times your expected volume. A team that has run production systems can do this; one that has only built them will find the question surprising.
Cloud application development services: decide deliberately how much lock in to accept
Using a provider's managed services makes you faster and ties you to that provider. That is frequently the right trade and it should be a decision rather than a default. Ask which provider specific services are proposed, what the alternatives are, and roughly what moving would cost later. The wrong approach is to pay for elaborate portability nobody will ever use; the other wrong approach is to discover the tie only when a contract is being renegotiated.
The shared responsibility split with a cloud based application development company is where breaches happen
Providers secure their infrastructure; you secure your configuration, identity, access and data. Most publicised cloud incidents come from the customer side of that line: overly permissive storage, credentials committed to a repository, unused administrative access nobody revoked. The NIST Cybersecurity Framework is a workable structure for agreeing who does what, and the elements at 16 CFR 314.4 are a practical checklist for the controls themselves.
Operability is what you are buying from a cloud software development company
A cloud application is only as good as your ability to see what it is doing and change it safely. Require infrastructure described in code in your repository, monitoring and alerting that a human will actually act on, a deployment process someone other than the author can run, and a documented restore that has been tested rather than assumed. Ask when a bidder last restored a production system from backup, and treat hesitation as an answer.
Questions people ask about cloud app development company
What should we ask a cloud development company?
To model the monthly cost at expected volume and at ten times that, to name which provider specific services it proposes and what moving would cost later, and when it last tested a restore from backup. All three separate operators from builders.
Is provider lock in a problem with cloud development services?
It is a trade that should be made deliberately. Managed services make you faster and tie you in, which is often correct. Paying for elaborate portability nobody uses is the other error. Know the cost of moving before you commit.
Who is responsible for cloud security?
The provider secures its infrastructure; you secure configuration, identity, access and data. Most publicised incidents are on the customer side: permissive storage, committed credentials, and administrative access nobody revoked.