What factors should be considered when selecting a cloud vendor or provider for your business?
Cloud adoption rate has been rapidly increasing especially since the 2020 pandemic outbreak and is expected to dominate the IT sector in the coming years.
By 2025, Gartner estimates that over 95% of new digital workloads will be deployed on cloud-native platforms, up from 30% in 2021.
With such tremendous growth in the cloud computing sector, the number of service providers available has also increased to a great extent, thus giving a multitude of options to users to choose from.
Owning a data centre involves both high maintenance and high cost, in contrast to investing the same (or probably lesser) amount in opting for a cloud service provider which not only takes away your worry of maintaining the infrastructure, but also offers various other benefits like data storage, resources, security and hardware capabilities.
With cloud service providers proliferating and each offering the best services at a minimal pricing model, it becomes quite difficult to choose the right provider for your business.
Let’s look at how the right cloud provider plays an important role in contributing to your business’s success and when choosing a cloud provider, what should be one consideration in the decision making process?
What is a cloud service provider?
A cloud provider is a third-party organization that offers cloud computing services, including servers and storage space that they rent out to people over the internet. This can be really helpful for businesses or individuals who need a lot of computing power or storage, but don’t want to have to buy and maintain their own physical servers.
Instead, they can just pay a cloud provider a monthly or yearly fee to access the resources they need, and the cloud provider takes care of everything else. It’s a convenient and flexible way to get access to the computing power and storage you need, without having to worry about the technical details.
Why is it important to choose the right cloud providers?
When choosing a cloud provider, what should be one consideration in the decision making process?
A cloud infrastructure provider company uses their own data centers and computing resources and manage them on a regular basis. They basically take care of your infrastructure so that you can focus on your core business objective.
By offering their services on a pay-as-you-go basis model, they help you prevent resource wastage so that you invest money in purchasing only the required number of resources.
Switching to a cloud service provider saves you the extra cost which you would have incurred in buying and maintaining that infrastructure on your own. Opting for the right cloud provider is critical to your organization’s long term success as it helps in keeping your data easily accessible from any device safely and securely.
Choosing the wrong service provider may cost heavily to the organization and might lead to huge monetary losses and pose a severe security threat to confidential data.
What things to consider when choosing a cloud provider for business?
The cloud computing market is flooded with various cloud service providers ranging from smaller enterprises to highly reputed and accomplished cloud giants.
When there are multiple options available, it complicates the decision of opting for the best cloud service providers as the business needs to weigh the pros and cons of every vendor as it is not advisable to switch cloud infrastructure providers hastily.
When choosing a cloud provider, what should be one consideration in the decision making process?
1. Cost Benefits
Whenever you are looking for the best cloud service provider for your business, make sure that you are getting the following cost benefits:
- Flexible billing and plans
- No lock-in periods
- Get discounts when you commit for a long time
- Pay-as-you-go billing models
- Easy scaling and stoppage of services
2. Company Profile
Secondly, it is important to understand and assess your business requirements and ensure that the cloud service provider aligns with your business strategy. Keep a tab on the below pointers to shortlist the cloud service provider easily:
- Check whether the services offered are in line with your corporate strategy,
- Check whether their service model suits your business,
- Review their years of experience in the industry,
- Research the reviews about their customer support,
- Check how soon they are resolving their customer complaints
These are not the only aspects to look into before choosing a cloud service provider — there are many more factors that you should consider depending on your business and as per its unique requirements.
3. Licences, Certifications and Standards
Thirdly, and most importantly, you need to emphasise on licences and certifications your cloud service providers have as those provide an idea that they are compliant with the best industry practices and the necessary standards in the cloud industry. Generally, cloud service providers are DMTF, RDS CAL or PCI DSS certified.
Cloud providers must comply with all industry certifications, especially ISO 27001 and other regulations mandated by various governments. The following image lists the important certifications and standards meant for cloud providers.
Important standards and certifications for cloud providers
(Image credits: Cloud Industry Forum)
4. Technology Advancements
Next, you need to analyze whether the cloud provider in question is offering a good mix of services and promises to show continued growth and innovation over time.
Check whether the cloud provider’s offered technologies are matching your organization’s requirement.
Get insights into overall services provided including commitment to certain technologies and evaluate the overall portfolio.
Fig 1. Cloud provider selection criteria
5. Data Security and Governance
You should go for that cloud service provider which offers you customized data security for your critical data and that comes with certified firewalls that you can trust under any circumstances.
With cloud data being prone to dangerous security threats, you would want to protect your network from any unwanted attack by making sure your cloud provider offers a cloud-based Intrusion Prevention System (IPS) that offers you unmatched protection for your data.
Research extensively on the cloud service provider’s website that they offer sufficient data protection and have legal data management policies in place so that they could handle and manage your data efficiently without any loss.
Ensure they are trusted, well-established, and authorized cloud providers, who will secure your data with a weekly or monthly backup and ensure confidentiality.
Also, take care that your cloud service provider is HIPAA and GDPR (for Europe) compliant as these are vital safety standards.
6. Partnerships and Integrations
The next step is to check that the cloud service provider is engaged in multiple vendor integrations or partnerships which will be favorable for your organization. A cloud provider with multiple-vendor relationships will be able to smoothly cater to your business needs by offering many more of the latest technologies.
7. Contracts & SLAs
Following that, you need to check for service delivery and legal protection thoroughly before agreeing to the terms of the cloud service provider. Cloud service level agreements (SLAs) can be complicated to understand and may have certain misleading terminologies.
So, before agreeing to these terms, ensure that the terms are checked by a law firm so that you are aware of the circumstances wherein you are eligible to get a refund and of the uptime you can expect for the cloud services.
Review the terms and conditions to know how soon their customer support acknowledges and responds to resolve a customer complaint.
- Vendor lock-in: Avoid opting for a cloud provider that doesn’t allow you to switch to another provider in the future particularly because of their complex policies and technologies.
- Migration Support: Look for a cloud service provider that offers you assistance in migration. Most cloud providers offer assessment tools to help their customers deal with their application migration. Ask the provider for all the services they offer for migration support.
8. Reliability & Performance
Last, but surely not the least, focus on the reliability and performance of the cloud service provider and review its past 6-12 months against their SLAs thoroughly and plan your next steps.
Ensure that the provider has incorporated a monitoring and reporting mechanism and ask the provider for this information if there isn’t any available documentation on their website. Check the cloud service provider’s past performance by meticulously researching about the provider on the internet.
Also check how they handle server downtime and how their support team resolves customer issues.
Reasons why you should go for Ace Cloud Solutions
Ace Cloud Hosting is an authorized application hosting provider and renowned public cloud service provider to small businesses, SMBs, accountants, CPAs, and enterprises.
Ace can be an advantageous choice as a cloud provider keeping in mind it fulfils all of the above parameters with its leading edge technical and operational capabilities along with the following salient features:
- Ace Cloud Hosting equips businesses and professionals in various industries, such as accounting, legal, real estate and many more with cloud solutions powered by High-Performance Computing servers that check every box on quality standards, including security, availability, and consistency of speed.
- Ace stays on top of innovative technologies and provides database and storage options for your business requirements to help you build a robust infrastructure.
- Ace is RDS CAL certified, which secures your critical intellectual property and simplifies regulatory compliance to work remotely with a single interface.
- Ace is PCI-DSS certified FWaaS and helps you regulate your network traffic and secures your data by providing services at competitive prices.
- Ace data centers are HIPAA compliant.
- Ace offers 99.99% SLA uptime guarantee.
- Ace understands the unique requirements of clients and addresses them with custom solutions and ensures quality services.
Ace enables enterprises to operate remotely from anywhere, without worrying about security and empowers them to work more efficiently. We offer our customers the following benefits:
- Cost savings: It saves businesses money as they don’t have to create their own IT infrastructure by purchasing expensive hardware.
- Flexibility: Ace offers flexibility to businesses by offering on-demand services through a customized control panel so that you can seamlessly scale your resources as per your business needs and budget.
- Security: Ace prioritizes security and offers advanced features like authentication, encryption, access management, etc. to ensure foolproof security for the cloud data.
- Mobility: Ace allows you to access your data from anywhere and at any time, and boosts your employees’ productivity by ensuring the information is available always on the go.
- Collaboration: Ace empowers businesses to seamlessly communicate and securely share information with users so that they work on the same document simultaneously.
- Disaster recovery: Ace is well-equipped to withstand unforeseen events and has put in place a robust data backup and recovery services to ensure business continuity.
- Automatic updates: With manual software update tasks being a tedious time-taking process, Ace regularly refreshes the systems with updates to provide businesses with up-to-date software and upgraded processing power.
Get in touch with us today to get personalized public cloud solutions.
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