10 Things To Consider When Choosing A Cloud Service Provider

Choosing the right cloud service provider for your company requires more than just visiting the prospective cloud vendor’s website and reading the reviews on other websites.

If you’re looking to find the right scalable cloud hosting service to improve business success, then opt for a suitable cloud service provider that can offer an easily scalable shared and virtualised infrastructure.

Whether you are in the process of migrating to the cloud or a current cloud adopter, we provided the acronym: “PERFECTION” to remember these 10 technological and business considerations when choosing a cloud service provider.

Pricing – Make sure you look at the pricing plans before purchasing a package. Whilst some cloud vendors claim to have the cheapest rates, this won’t spare you on upfront payments and any long-term contracts. Sign up for a cloud account that offers flexible pricing and allows you to scale up and down according to your IT needs.

Expertise – Choose a cloud service provider that is an industry expert and is an established brand that is familiar with almost any software that your company wants to use. The cloud expert should have anticipated what most enterprise users need and jumps ahead of the competition as a proactive cloud expert.

Reliability – How reliable is the cloud vendor? Can the cloud servers consistently handle robust bandwidth and data exchange in uptime? Make sure you partner with a reliable hosting provider that can manage the entire hosting environment, especially if your website receives robust traffic in uptime.

Financially stable –You must consider the financial stability of the cloud vendor. The number of years of experience (more than 10 years is recommended) and its position in the stock market are significant factors to consider. Get the latest updates on the cloud vendor’s stock prices, earnings and financial reports to help you decide which would be best for you.

Easily managed – The cloud service provider should have an easy management system for the IT staff to manage, control and maintain with efficiency and simplicity. Find a cloud vendor that allows you to view the entire servers in a single unified interface.

Customer-driven – It’s hard to work with a cloud vendor that is after profits and sales only. Make sure the vendor is customer-driven and provides 24/7 support whether in chat, call or email. You may also make your own research by comparing customer satisfaction and employee approval rating of the vendor from various sources.

Transparent – Aside from the transparent pricing plans, you must take a look at the managed service level agreements, security and data policies and terms of service of the cloud service provider. The last thing you would want to do is compromise your clients’ private information and experience outage during peak seasons.

Integration – Late adopters are somehow half-hearted to migrate the whole infrastructure to the cloud because the fact is that on premise working environment is widely used. If you see the potential that allows cloud to accelerate your business, then find a cloud vendor that provides easy integration of current network resources into the cloud apps and servers.

Openness – This technological consideration pertains to the cloud vendor on seamless workload and virtual machines movements. If you are not ready to move the entire infrastructure, then make sure the cloud service provider is open for flexible solutions.

Network Ownership – The cloud vendor must have a robust, secured and resilient network to deliver reliable network connectivity through the cloud services with efficiency. The cloud vendor must be able to manage the unforeseen challenges of cloud services and take ownership of the overall infrastructure.

Cloud computing has played a huge role in improving businesses worldwide, allowing business to scale the infrastructures they need. It also provides flexibility as well as driving operational efficiencies, therefore companies are able to react faster to any issues that might arise.

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