Make sure you know what to look for in a cloud provider before you make your decision.
It can be difficult to choose a service provider that will best suit your needs. If you follow the advice in this article though, you are sure to make the best decision when it comes to your cloud service provider.
Choosing the right cloud service provider to suit your business needs can be difficult. There are many cloud service vendors to choose from and most of them specialize in different services like IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service), PaaS (Platform as a Service), and SaaS (Software as a Service). While choosing the best cloud service provider for your business may seem like an impossible task, there are a few steps you can take in evaluating cloud service providers to make sure you make the right decision.
What to Consider When Choosing a Cloud Provider
Knowing how to choose the right cloud solution for your business starts with knowing your business objectives. Without knowing these objectives, you can’t expect your provider to know them or can help you achieve them. Before you decide to sign with any provider, the best thing to do is to verify that they are fully committed to understanding your business and the objectives you are looking to achieve. Make sure you listen to what each provider promises you and watch out for red flags like if they only offer to boost technical gains. Providers that are only focused on technical gains might have excellent technology, but this technology may not be relevant to your business or your needs.
Other criteria for selecting a cloud service provider you should look for are the security it provides and for what cost. A good thing to think about when looking at the type of security your potential cloud prover will offer you is to know the location of their data centers. Sensitive applications should be close to your users so don’t choose a provider whose data centers are thousands of miles away from your users. It is essential that the data center be close to your users to provide them with the best user experience which increases the positive reputation of your brand. It is important to keep in mind, though, that comparing security and cost between providers isn’t easy and, in many cases, it’s not an apples-to-apples comparison.
While it may be tough to discover information related to a provider’s cost or security strategy, a way to compare providers is to know how they secure their network, their data and, most importantly, your data. The Security Trust and Assurance Registry (STAR) certification program was launched in 2013 by the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) and British Standards Institution (BSI) to standardize how the market evaluates a cloud provider’s security. This program assesses service provider’s security environments through a third-party system and providers that receive the certification are listed on the CSA STAR registry. Look at this registry is a great way to verify that any prover you are looking to use offers the best security for your company’s data.
The right cloud service provider evaluation criteria depend on your company and the goals you wish to complete with the help of your cloud provider. Each business is different and the criteria you have for your provider might not be the same as another business in your same office suite. Make sure you do diligent research on the different providers available to you to ensure that you choose the best one that will help you achieve your business goals. It is also important to remember that the cheapest provider is not always the best and neither is the most expensive one. If you have not chosen a cloud service provider to help your company yet, follow these steps to ensure that the provider to choose is well suited for your needs.
