Dechacca Ponnappa provides an expert checklist of requirements that enterprises must consider while selecting their cloud service provider
Irrespective of whether it is a large enterprise, a small business or an entrepreneur looking to build a startup, the challenge in choosing a cloud service provider is complex. There are many clouds, each developed and operated by its own service provider, who will establish the definition and operation standards in their own manner. With such an assortment of clouds to choose from and the ease of provisioning cloud offers, enterprises may try various clouds by placing few workloads with different service providers.
According to Frost & Sullivan the Indian third party cloud market is expected to grow at a CAGR of 33.3% over a period of FY2014-2020.
Here are some important questions to ask your prospective cloud service provider:
Service provider credibility
Does the service provider have a proven track record that will meet the criteria of performance, scale and reach that an enterprise needs, not just for the business today, but as it grows and expands tomorrow?
For how many years have the cloud services been offered, and in how many countries?
How many new product releases have happened so far and how much is the investment on R&D?
How many customers does the cloud service provider presently have in the country the enterprise is operating in?
Which is the largest customer they have supported and how comparable is one’s workload to that of customer’s workload?
Security
Can the service provider fulfill the organisation’s compliance policies and external regulatory requirements?
Does the service provider have a track record/experience of fulfilling the data privacy requirements in a respective industry and geography?
How can data leakage be prevented?
How can one get a view of the data that is not physically controlled by the enterprise?
How will one’s data be separated from other clients, who will be sharing the same IT Infrastructure such as servers, network, and storage?
Does the cloud service provider supply an audit report that details results and responses of periodic security assessments?
Cost
Are provisioning, hosting, and management services included in the cost model or does it attract extra cost?
Will an enterprise be able to scale and add additional users at the same cost?
Would product upgrades require additional cost?
Is there an extra cost for customer support or any bug fixing?
Is there a cost to migrate historical data onto the cloud?
Reliability and Uptime
What will be the cloud’s annual uptime metrics and how are they measured? What is the average length of an outage?
What has been the track record of annual reported uptime versus the service level agreement?
Is the cloud solution certified by an authorised independent third party trustee?
Deployment and Integration
What is the deployment time frame, integration practice, and project management methodology that will be followed?
What is the role of the enterprise and the service provider in the implementation? Will there be charges for guiding the enterprise to perform its role effectively?
Are there any tools for integration or loading that may be required from the enterprise?
Features and Specification
How is this solution unique to support the enterprise’s requirements as compared to other solutions?
Will the enterprise be able to achieve the required performance from the workloads hosted on the cloud?
How will the workloads on cloud seamlessly interact with the enterprise’s existing legacy infrastructure?
Is it a scalable solution that can align to the enterprise’s growing business needs?
The cloud strategy of the enterprise should not just match today’s vision, but also become a foundation for the future. Specifically, the enterprises should look for the following characteristics:
Interoperability: Interoperability is sometimes described as “Hybrid Cloud”. To extract maximum benefit from cloud, enterprises should choose a solution that allows workloads to operate from different environments.
Service Level Agreement Given the dislocated relationship that can exist between the provider and the enterprise, an acceptable user policy where the enterprise should know what is covered in the SLA by looking for explicitly stated exceptions and understand why the provider has excluded the same, has to be established.
Cost Cloud is a cost effective model compared to an on-premise data center. However, comparing price tags of differentiated service providers with undifferentiated mass market commodity providers is not a like comparison. There could be huge hidden costs for a business in the cloud architecture or advisory services, which may not be captured in the pricing catalogue that is published.
Version Control The provider’s service will evolve over time. The features present today, may be withdrawn tomorrow and only some may persist indefinitely. When the initially accepted agreements of a contract are changed, then the enterprise should review the impact of the withdrawal or addition of services with the service provider. Hence, enterprises should put a mechanism in place to be informed of the changes and amend the contract to suit their future requirement.
Access to Technical Expertise Although cloud is mostly automated, quite a few enterprises will still rely on the cloud service provider for support since they do not have internal staff or administrators. It is therefore important to validate that the provider offers the level of customer service the enterprise is accustomed to. Additional levels of support such as advisory services and professional services to help develop a long term cloud strategy for optimal long term cloud performance have to be part of the key evaluation criteria.
Last word
The TCO analysis will be a major decision factor to migrate to cloud and enterprises often miss critical variables such as IT staff required to manage an unmanaged cloud, time to market, competitive advantage etc. The future of cloud will be hybrid cloud; allowing enterprises to derive more value and drive innovation.
Dechacca Ponnappa, Senior Research Analyst, ICT Practice, Frost & Sullivan
