Shopping for a managed cloud provider? It can be tricky choosing between the deluge of providers clamoring for your money.
But here’s the thing…
The best cloud hosting providers not only provide the right infrastructure but also a reliable and consistent service. To make sure your experience is painless from the word go, you need to do some due diligence before settling on a provider.
Here’s how to go about it.
1. List Down Your Service Requirements
Compile a list of services that are a must-have for your organization. These might include a private cloud for your data, data centers for computations and data processing, and virtual servers for your production environments. You might find that your requirements will necessitate signing up with more than one vendor. Ideally, you will want everything hosted under one roof. This makes it easier to negotiate service contracts and manage your system.
2. Review the Vendor’s Hardware Capabilities
Your hardware requirements will largely depend on the resource demands of your system. Confirm that the vendor can actually meet your requirements before signing up. You’ll need to be specific about processor speeds, storage space, and memory allocation. Other than that, you need to assess the service provider’s IT support services, data monitoring, data recovery, and in-region network infrastructure. Make sure the vendor understands the internal operations of your business since managed cloud is a very customized engagement.
3. Pricing Structure
The rule of thumb when shopping for a cloud vendor is to only pay for what you use. Avoid paying large upfront costs. It’s risky since you don’t really know what you’re getting. Most vendors use a pay-as-you-go pricing scheme. You should also be able to upgrade your plan and add services when the need arises. You can be charged either hourly, monthly, semi-annually or annually. This will largely depend on the vendor. You can expect to pay anywhere between $1 per to $100 per month for every user depending on your organization’s needs.
4. Scrutinize Security
Your company’s data is valuable and you don’t want it falling into the wrong hands. For this reason, you should ensure that your cloud provider has put in place best in class security measures. Make sure they have the basics covered – a firewall, anti-virus, multi-factor user-authentication, and data encryption. Ask whether they perform regular security audits and what internal and external security protocols they’ve put in place. You need to be sure that your data is safe from hackers, hardware failures, user errors, and negligence by the vendor.
5. Have Your Paperwork in Order
After you’ve chosen a provider, negotiate a service-level agreement (SLA). This is a contract that defines the service standards (quality, availability, and responsibilities) the provider is obligated to meet. The SLA should include consequences for failure and benchmarks for success. This allows you to hold the vendor to account should anything untoward happen. You should get regular reports on performance, up-time and outages, and logging information such as bandwidth usage.
Whatever managed cloud provider you choose, make sure to monitor their performance. Bolt out the door at the first sign of trouble. You cannot afford to work with a vendor when you have persistent down times and poor support.
