How to Find a Cloud Provider

Instead of developing their own cloud solutions, many smaller IT solution providers choose to work with cloud service vendors to provide customers with various services. There are a lot of cloud providers today, making it difficult to choose the best one among them. Choosing the wrong provider is a waste of time, money and effort. Here are some tips on how to find the right cloud provider.

Availability and Security

Ask the vendor how they monitor and manage security issues, conduct maintenance updates and install patches. Make sure that it matches your expected level of service or security. It is important that you ask them about where they host data. Do they use a dedicated or shared environment? How many servers are they using? What disaster recovery processes do they have? You should also ask if the infrastructure is 100% redundant and mirrored. 

Sales Process

If the company representative takes time to evaluate and understand your business needs, it is possible that everyone in the entire company has the same attitude. You have to make sure that the vendor really pays attention to your needs and doesn’t only intend to sell. After-sale support can tell a lot about the professionalism, quality and seriousness of the vendor’s processes.

Integration

Don’t forget to ask the vendor how their solution integrates with your existing IT environment.  You should also learn more about their game plan and track record of integrating their solution with other on-premise solutions you’ve previously installed. Ask about their contingency plan and the guarantees they provide.

Pricing

What is the vendor’s pricing and billing structure? The majority of cloud providers set up billing as a monthly item. Do you have to sign a contract and will it renew automatically? If the price is very cheap, you should be suspicious. Are you required to meet a minimum number of users in order to get a good price? Can you cancel anytime without paying any hidden fees? 

Uptime Metrics

You need to know how the cloud provider measures uptime and delivers reports. Determine how they communicate everything to customers like server reliability, delivery and hosting. How do they handle major outages? How do they usually communicate with clients? Is it through email, SMS, chat or phone? It is also important to determine if the cloud provider is proactively reactive or proactive when an issue occurs.

Cloud Compatible

Some applications are not cloud compatible. Internet bandwidth problems may also hinder the app’s performance. Having a high-performance hosted app server isn’t enough if the internet bandwidth limitations deliver a poor user experience. Application portability is another factor to consider. Moving an app server to the cloud might be easy, but the app might have other requirements that make the move harder. Older apps may not be cloud compatible as well. Check with the cloud provider about the cloud compatibility of the app.

You need to determine if moving to the cloud fits in your current IT roadmap. Whether you want to attract the best talents, use technology that boosts your business performance and productivity or grow your client base, you need to find the cloud provider that meets your exact needs. 

For more information please move here Managed Cloud Service Provider