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The future of the cloud will be one where cloud-delivered services will be the standard for IT.
Nearly every one of today’s businesses has implemented cloud computing technology into its environment to secure their applications and services. Businesses are innovating quickly to fulfill their business goals. With the assistance of cloud computing, businesses will continue to expand, and a cloud-first strategy will be vital.
While more businesses are migrating to the cloud, not all cloud service providers are the same. A variety of conversations will arise when you decide that it is time to take your business through digital transformation to the cloud. If you have reached this stage of the process, you’ve likely already addressed some of your biggest challenges and created a detailed roadmap to guide you.
The next step is choosing the cloud provider that will be the best fit for your business now and in the future. A few IT experts shared some of the most important factors they considered when choosing a cloud provider. Here’s what these industry experts had to say on the cloud industry and what factors played a part in their decision to choose their current cloud provider.
Aaron Kane, Chief Executive Officer, CTI Technology
“In small to medium-sized businesses, cloud appetite varies. However, two key elements seem to be the focus; straightforward pricing with a mature support system. The SMB market is more accepting of startups and emerging players. Free months of service or credits are no match for an easy and clear pricing model with a live support system.
Enterprise businesses seem to be more focused on AWS and Azure. Sadly, the late 70’s mantra rings true today. Nobody ever gets fired for buying IBM…insert Azure or AWS.”
Ilan Sredni, CEO & President, Palindrome Consulting, Inc. – “Delivering Peace of Mind”
“Although we initially tested different clap providers based on trial licenses or free credits, the decision really came down to integration with our overall environment. Being that we are Microsoft-centric in the products that we used it made more sense to use azure instead of AWS or GCP. The ability to integrate the cloud with the on-premise applications gives us additional flexibility which of the time was not even available with the other providers. Although some of the same feature sets are currently available, at this point it does not make sense for us to look at changing because we are happy with your decision.”
Joe Cannata, Owner, Techsperts, LLC
“We are a Microsoft shop and recommend Microsoft 365 and Azure to our clients. With our many years of experience, we have seen the cloud and its many products and services continue to evolve across many platforms. We look for qualities such as stability, ease of use, and simple integration to ensure our clients can operate efficiently with state-of-the-art tools. Microsoft has consistently delivered and is always innovating with new tools and services.”
Kenny Riley, Technical Director, Velocity IT
“There are many cloud service providers to choose from, all offering different products and services for budgets of all types. We decided to host our infrastructure within Microsoft Azure for several reasons.
While AWS is still the largest cloud service provider by far, Microsoft has dramatically expanded its cloud offering and capabilities over the years. Microsoft Azure includes service offerings ranging from cloud-based virtual machines, storage, networking, DevOps, site recovery, DNS, and more.
Additionally, most of our customer base is running in Microsoft environments already, leveraging technologies such as Microsoft Azure Active Directory and Intune. Rather than stand up cloud infrastructure with another vendor, it just makes sense most in most cases to keep everything under the Microsoft umbrella for simplicity and ease of integration with existing applications and infrastructure.
Finally, as a Microsoft Silver Partner, we receive free Azure credits, which allow us to utilize internally and test several of Microsoft’s cloud offerings to gain a deep knowledge of their product lines.”
Robert Giannini, Chief Security Officer and CEO, GiaSpace
“Since our business model is primarily datacenter driven, we chose to go Private Cloud because of the stigma of entering into a utility-based system where overages and hands-on for core technical issues are out of our control. We scoped out the networks we support with the big 3 cloud providers. The resources required and the multiple tiers with premiums on what would be needed were not delivering a benefit over our Private Cloud specs.
When choosing which provider you want to invest in, planning properly, and understanding your network, will save a lot of money and headaches in the end. Companies hear west coast and east coast redundancy, and assume that is out of the box included.”
Closing Thoughts
A cloud management platform will become a necessary requirement for any business running in the cloud. As you determine which cloud provider(s) your business will use, you must evaluate every option that the cloud provider offers and determine if that cloud provider will be a perfect fit. Will that cloud provider be able to support your unique business needs and objectives. The key elements to consider for nearly every business are as follows:
- Business Compatability
- Cloud Security
- Cloud Compliance
- Cost
- Service Levels
- Customer Support
- Manageability & Reliability
More of today’s businesses are relying on cloud services to support their infrastructure, software, or services to support innovation, flexibility, performance, and more. A cloud services provider will be necessary to ensure IT is delivering the maximum value out your business’s cloud services while enabling your business to keep up with the speed of cloud innovation.
Cloud computing is cost-effective, and it can be used by businesses of all sizes to grow at scale. The cloud industry has many competitors, including the more well-known — Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform (GCP) — and others like BlueHost and Alibaba. Currently, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform are leading the race.
For any business, moving to the cloud is a major decision. Do your research and choose the best cloud provider for your business and its unique needs.