Today, as businesses and big IT giants are in transition from their traditional data-centers to the cloud, making the choice of the right cloud provider is a tough decision. Gaining the trust of the customers is of utmost importance to any vendor. Similarly, users must be assured about the cloud providers they are evaluating, depending upon the organization’s road-map to business growth.
Cloud Vendors are at their peak with their offerings in the market, providing a suite of cloud computing services to niche players along with their customized services. Security, maintenance, backup and support are amongst the most important industry concerns today.
So how do we aim to select the right vendor from so many options? The answer lies in the unexampled set of needs of users, such as –
Know Your Business Aspirations – A cloud vendor should be aware of the organization’s business perspectives and should know how to deal with them clearly. One must ensure that the objectives are logged in with providers beforehand for gaining the desired cloud goals.
Providers should not only be focused on technical gains but should also be sure of business outcomes, thereby facilitating their customers with excellent product delivery in terms of maintenance, lower cost and ease of use.
Security and Cost – Even the cost of investing in the cloud plays a vital role as small-scale industries find it difficult to adapt to reputed cloud vendors such as Amazon, Google and Microsoft. Alternatively, they switch to the public cloud, increasing the threat of security.
Providers aiming to cover every aspect of cloud security with appropriate measures taken such as identity and access management, auditing of cloud data with security intelligence in addition to cost benefits solution are preferred over the less secured cloud.
Evaluating The Right Cloud Vendor
Is a Filter needed on the Services provided by the Vendors? Your cloud computing necessities will determine the services you choose from a specific vendor. Online storage options are available for storing any document.
Increase in demand can cause providers to offer on-demand servers for storage, infrastructure set-up and application software.
Technologies Involved and Technical Guidance: Cloud platform and technology should go with the current environment of the customer. More restructuring of the set-up means more workload. Ensure that the provider’s components and sub-components, standards and services suit your management preferences. Full technical support is required by the enterprises for migrating to the cloud and deploying cloud services.
Service Level Agreements: Provider’s SLA is an important agreement to be signed between the two parties as it acts as a potential roadmap to handle issues and future gaps. It ensures the security of the company and provides stability. The primary goal of SLA is to establish a trust relationship between the cloud provider and the consumer including their common exit strategies.
As the pace to be amongst the best has risen, the criteria to select the best cloud provider has become more stringent. To comply with efficient, cost effective and simplified business goals, enterprises require a focused examination on choosing the cloud provider that offers a varied range of services to grow their business. It requires a holistic approach and an end-to-end view of how the vendors have complied with the mission-critical applications and their support.