Once you have decided that you should move on to cloud, the next immediate step would be look for a good service provider. This is an important step in moving on to cloud because choice of service provider will bear a great effect on the success or failure of cloud deployment. Here are some tips that will help you to narrow down your choice from the host of providers out there in the market.
1. Overall experience: Cloud is a new concept but the problems it solves are age old. You should always try to locate service providers with experience in managing large data centers, mission critical applications, and hosting them.
2. Knowledge in your Industry: A service provider with knowledge and experience in dealing with clients from your industry will always be a better to go with. Such a provider will be easily recognize and know your necessities and would be able to offer you better service. You could take reference from peers too, especially from the ones with the similar characteristics of staff strength, nature of business, turnover etc. This is very significant consideration as a provider for a multi bullion organization will not be able to do justice to a Small Business Enterprise and the vice versa.
3. Specialists in your vertical: If you could find specialists providers for your vertical, give them special brownie points. As these people will know what and how it should be done and will make migrating to cloud much easier.
4. Provider with futuristic thinking: Cloud technology is still evolving and in the long run will undergo lots of changes. The cloud service provider should have the potential to change and adapt the new methods and pass on its benefits to the clients.
5. Technical expertise: self service portals of cloud and automated tools have made working with cloud technology very much simple. Yet it’s always better to know that your cloud service provider has the ability to solve technical issues and also leverage cloud to cloud integrations. These sought of cloud integrations save a lot time and money.
6. Interoperability: Ensure your cloud service provider supports workloads in multiple environments. For example: a part of the application may need to be on private cloud and certain aspects on the public and they could be swapped around. The cloud service provider should be able to provide a common infrastructure for public, private and hybrid cloud.
7. Security: While shifting to cloud you are entrusting a third party to take care of your valuable data and application. Ensure the service provider understands the importance and has security as one of his main priority.
8. Trust and faith: There is talk of credentials, experience and expertise but apart from all these factors the emotional quotient of comfort level and positive vibes is very important to do a business in the long run.
