Blog, Cloud
With the growth of cloud technology in the recent years, cloud platforms have become the norm for small and big businesses. The cloud is rising continuously, and its market is getting bigger, according to IDC that the investment will exceed $500 by 2020. According to the latest reports from Forrester, the cloud has cannibalized traditional on-premises technology, and the cloud is going to stay forever.
With many cloud service providers providing different levels of IT support and management, choosing the right service provider has become a daunting task. As the cloud marketplace is becoming broader with new deployment options, businesses need to consider various aspects related to their success when selecting a cloud enterprise software system.
Along with the required level of functionality to achieve the business goal, the service provider should have the type of deployment that goes with IT infrastructure of businesses. Firstly, enterprises need to make a decision what level and type of cloud services they want and whether you want to go with a public cloud or private cloud.
Just like any other software decision, criteria like fit, ROI, and risks have to be taken into consideration before selecting a right vendor.
Technologies Service Roadmap
Prior to deciding to migrate your complete business to the cloud, ensure that the service provider’s platform adapts to your current environment, and required technologies that support your cloud objectives.
Additionally, the provider’s standards, architectures, and services should go with your management workloads and priorities. Businesses need to check the extent of customization they have to do so that their T infrastructure can align with the platform of their service providers.
Go for a service provider which offers comprehensive migration services and complete assistance while assessment and planning phases. You should have an understanding of the services on offer and map this against your tasks to check who will do what. Mostly, the service providers support technical teams to help your team migrate to the cloud successfully.
Some large-scale public cloud providers give less help so you may need third-party help to help your team understand what cloud is and how they can automate their operations with it.
Certifications
No wonder every cloud vendor would claim about security and compliance. But a cloud client cannot rely on the quality of services without verifying of the third party certifications.
A reliable cloud provider should have proof of certification and auditing for the industry-standard data center.
The most notifying certifications that a cloud client looks out for are:
- PCI DSS for storing credit card data.
- SAS70 Type II for data center controls.
- HIPAA for healthcare data.
Make sure you take services from your a safe and compliant network that have certified infrastructure.
Compatibility with Existing Infrastructure
A question that gives tension to C- suite executives and IT executives who want to make cloud implementation- do new cloud platforms work with legacy solutions? It would be a good approach to track whether the technology offered could support the current infrastructure of a company. Further, the service provider should support multiple programming languages and databases to increase compatibility. In order to avoid vendor lock-in and confusions of selecting from various platforms, it can be a wiser effort to pick an infrastructure-agnostic, platform- agnostic, and hypervisor-agnostic platform on which you can shift workloads according to your requirements.
Disaster Recovery
Cloud disaster recovery is also called a backup plan that includes storage and maintenance of electronic data records in a cloud environment as per security concern. The cloud DR ensures data recovery or implement failover any time of disaster. Enterprises would be able to make a strategy for their next data storage system thus reducing downtime. They can use multiple cloud storage providers to minimize the risk of technical issues that arise during a single vendor.
Understanding Your Cloud Deployment Options
The four main cloud deployment options are:
Public Cloud
Its base is standard computing model, and the cloud service provider makes storage available to the general public.
Private Cloud
A private cloud environment is for business use only as the cloud vendor gives computing capabilities with the help of an organization’s firewall.
Virtual Private Cloud
It provides a multitenant cloud-hosting environment to provide high data security.
Hybrid Cloud Model
This model utilizes on-premise cloud platforms.
The selection of the right cloud service provider services as per your business goals to make the most out of the cloud.
Network Ownership
A robust, secure and resilient network is necessary for the cloud vendor to deliver reliable network connectivity to the users. Your cloud vendor should be capable of dealing with the unforeseen challenges of cloud services and take ownership of the complete infrastructure.
Pricing
Pricing is the essential key for companies looking to implement cloud backup as they need to balance service costs with different service levels.
So, businesses need to consider pricing models before selecting a right cloud service provider.
The shifting backup costs from CAPEX to OPEX is a unique selling proposition of moving back up to the cloud; some businesses stay with CAPEX model due to various monetary reasons. Different backup providers can provide quality-oriented and value-added services with a scalable pricing structure that fits your business model.
How much data is being stored after deduplication and compression and how much data is being chosen for cloud backup are the standard business models for cloud backup billing. You need to confirm whether the service provider includes uploading fees, download, setup fees, and couriered drive restores because this can lead to unpredictable expenditures expenses.