Cloud computing has witnessed mainstream adoption in recent years. However, infrastructure and operations leaders are still contemplating its benefits and best practices for navigating their digital transformation journey. By 2024, IT spending dedicated to the cloud is expected to accelerate, accounting for approximately 15%, according to Gartner. COVID-19 crisis and its repercussions are one of the major influences that gave a significant impetus to cloud adoption.
Gartner also states that 80% of companies, who are unaware of failures made during their cloud adoption journey, will see overspending in the range of 20% to 50% through 2024. The responsibility of leveraging the cloud maturity assessment falls on the shoulders of I&O leaders. They must follow best practices and apply insights gained from past cloud adopters for maximizing cost savings, achieving speed optimization, and early mitigation of risks.
Major Criteria for Selecting the Right Cloud Partner
Selecting the right cloud partner is a daunting process, as it may be confusing to choose between two cloud service providers (CSPs) with different but unique frameworks. Adopting the cloud environment demands extreme scrutiny in choosing the right partner to maintain the security and compliance of the infrastructure. Following are some of the key criteria that organizations must consider while choosing their cloud partner.
Security
Determining the security requirements is the first step for organizations, as security measures delivered by different CSPs vary significantly and ensuring compliance with industry standards and regulations is a mandate. By evaluating security features offered by the cloud providers and assessing their additional services, organizations can make informed decisions.
Compliance
Meeting all applicable industry standards and compliance regulations is the key emphasis area for organizations to consider while selecting their cloud service provider. It is mandatory that CSPs ensure that organizations understand their share of responsibilities in achieving compliance post-migration of applications and data to the cloud. They must also communicate the measures through which organizations will be able to achieve a robust compliance posture for their cloud infrastructure. Moreover, they should prioritize validating compliance for all requirements of organizations via third-party audits.
Analytics and Reporting
With an effective, end-to-end analytics and reporting process, organizations are able to track imperative metrics in their cloud environment. Advanced analytics is one of the key offerings of CSPs, which gives a complete analysis of historical data to organizations, thereby enabling them to ensure meeting their mission-critical objectives. It is important that organizations get advanced reporting of services that provides transparency about resource consumption, traffic, and other activities in their cloud environment.
Manageability
There are vast differences in the cloud platforms considering integration with existing services and orchestration tools. Organizations must understand their responsibility of efforts in managing their cloud environment. Additionally, It is crucial that they note the convenience of service integrations, which are indispensable for their business, along with the viability of transitioning to other similar services offered by CSPs.
Architecture
One of the most important things to be considered by organizations is to explore architecture types and identifying which ones best suit their application stack. These architectures can be any among web application, serverless architecture, or virtual machines. Most CSPs are currently providing serverless architectures, as organizations are relieved of performance, scalability, and infrastructure issues and can focus their efforts completely towards development. Organizations can also opt for virtual machines if they want their servers to be self-managed. In the case of a web application, organizations are allowed to run applications and deploy the code directly without worrying about software installation, operating system, or infrastructure.
Support
24/7 infrastructure support is one of the fundamental requirements of organizations. This is especially true if they expect their operations to continue running during non-business hours. For this, organizations must verify the types of support delivered by CSPs and the time-effectiveness of being supported on queries and their resolution.
To Sum UP
All the aforementioned criteria are best practices for organizations to choose the right cloud service provider for their business requirements. It is recommended that organizations remain vigilant and make informed decisions in selecting their cloud partner. The decision-making includes investigations on certifications and standards followed by CSPs as well as their adherence to security norms.
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