Before even choosing a cloud provider, you should ask yourself the following question, what do great cloud products look like? If you ask 50 cloud developers, you will certainly get 50 different answers. The mission for many cloud providers is to offer high performing products.
Many companies struggle with maintaining their tech infrastructure. Therefore, they hire managed IT service firms to help do this. Techgroup.net managed IT services are a good example of high performing products that businesses opt for when they are seeking to make the most of the cloud. Other companies create cloud engineering teams in-house.
It’s important to evaluate the efforts and processes cloud engineering teams use to advance their technology when comparing cloud providers. Reputable cloud engineers refer to the user experience for them to determine their success.
It can be challenging to select a suitable cloud provider especially today since the market is flooded with a lot of cloud services providers. Moving your business applications to the cloud can be very stressful, but a long-term solution for storing and managing applications.
Choosing the wrong provider or the wrong services from the provider can cost your company dearly. So the following are some key areas to make an assessment to help you avoid making such mistakes.
Associated Costs
Cost shouldn’t be the main basis for critical decision even though it’s a significant factor when it comes to choosing a cloud provider. Decision makers should not rely only on simple charts when it comes to cost considerations. They should make considerations on the company’s long-term strategies.
However, it’s better to focus on the current and near-future IT and business objectives. Also, you should consider the overall pricing plan of the team and choose the one that offers cloud solutions that are in line with the company’s objectives.
The cloud engineering team you contract should provide solutions that are in line with the company’s current and long-term pricing model. The cost should also be within the budget and appropriate for the services offered.
Provider Resiliency
The best cloud provider is the one with the capability to provide top system availability on the service level agreements. Nearly all cloud providers promise not less than 99.9% system availability on service level agreements. However, many providers don’t have the ability to measure this figure.
It is essential to review the provider’s uptime and outage history in order to assess the system resiliency and availability. You should not ignore their overall resiliency in data recovery and data management processes. The management should also consider the levels of Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) targeted by the engineering teams. This should shed more light on the impacts of these levels to their business before making any decision.
Security and Compliance
The cloud provider’s security in critical areas should also be assessed. Some of these areas include Role-Based Access Control (RBAC), government and industry regulations, physical industry compliance controls, data encryption mechanisms and anti-malware protection.
Cloud Resource Alliance (CSA) is an excellent resource to depend on. The CSA has established a Security, Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR). This registry is publicly accessible and is specifically designed to improve transparency and assurance in the cloud.
The registry includes a questionnaire to use when evaluating your cloud engineering team. In addition to the questionnaire, it is imperative to know whether the teams participate and comply with the CSA’s STAR guidelines.
Technology Capabilities
Companies should understand the cloud solutions being offered by the targeted provider and the implementation record of new technologies based are on the market and business needs. It’s important to do an evaluation of the provider’s expertise beyond customer support. This can help you understand their capabilities to manage cloud applications.
Open vs. Proprietary
The key evaluation factor is understanding the level to which a cloud engineering team supports or utilizes an open source platform like OpenStack. Open cloud platforms can reduce vendor technicalities and associated pricing issues. The platforms also make the migration processes from one cloud vendor to another easier.
OpenStack also promotes the levels of innovation than in the case of a single-supplier proprietary cloud environment. This provides a greater degree of flexibility and choice, thus protecting your investments in cloud computing.