How to Choose the Right Cloud Services Partner for Your Business
How to Choose the Right Cloud Services Partner for Your Business
Blog Article
In a digital-first world, selecting the right cloud services provider can be one of the most consequential decisions a business can make. The plethora of providers all offering variations of services can be daunting when trying to find the right provider. However, with an organized strategy aligned with your business needs, selecting the right partner will be much easier. This is a useful guide to help you through the decision-making process. Read More
1. Understand Your Business Requirements
Begin by assessing what you want with your use of cloud services. Are you simply looking to improve your IT security, allow for remote working solutions, reduce your IT costs, increase the speed in which you can scale, etc.? The more concrete your definition is, the more you will be able to omit providers that cannot do what you want.
2. Assess Technical Knowledge and Experience
It is important to find a cloud partner that has demonstrated technical knowledge and hands-on experience in your industry, ideally over several years. In hands-on discussions, you will want to probe the team’s technical competencies, technical certifications, resources in the cloud (especially over the last 10-12 years), and what technologies they specialize in, either in AWS or Microsoft Azure, and/or a hybrid service. You want experience - particularly when it comes to migrating complex legacy environments, and/or dealing with mission-critical data.
3. Security and Compliance Should Be Priority
The first item to consider is security. Make sure the cloud partner employs industry security practices, offers data encryption, and complies with relevant regulations such as GDPR, HIPAA (for personal health data and personal identifiable information), or ISO certifications. Ask them to demonstrate their security practices, incident response plan, and whether there is any history (and communications) of previous violations of data breaches.
4. Evaluate Service and Support
Always consider support. When things go wrong, you definitely want to have support. So confirm you have reliable 24/7 support, dedicated account management, and clearly defined Services Level Agreements (SLAs). Fast response and good levels of pro-active monitoring significantly impact downtime and support your business to run as smoothly as possible.
5. Look for Scalability and Flexibility
Your cloud partner should have a growth mindset to grow with your business. Look for a provider with scalable options that can be adapted to your growth. Your business may need to expand globally, add more users, or just be flexible enough with your expectations while you grow without disruption.
6. Assess Pricing and Cost Transparency
Cloud pricing can be complicated; however your partner should be transparent about costs. Seek a provider with clear and predictable pricing models, preferably with no hidden fees. It's worthwhile to conduct a pricing comparison with competitors to ensure you're achieving value from your investment.
Conclusion
Selecting the right cloud services partner is not just vendor selection; it is aligning with a partner to be an *enabler* of new capabilities in the longer term. Take your time, do your diligence, and ask the right questions. A trusted partner will help to deliver the technical outcomes you are expecting, but also help to enable your organization to innovate and flourish in the cloud.