Cloud Services: Choose a True Partner, not a Vendor

Not all cloud platforms and providers are alike – Choose the right partner

The last few years have been a watershed in the revolution that reshaped the world’s perception of digital technology. Groundbreaking breakthroughs have pushed boundaries and made people see new possibilities in what were considered dead-ends. When cloud computing started garnering popularity, industry experts were blown away by the promise it showed; cut to the present and it’s impossible for the majority of organizations, both large and emerging, to sustain operations without the cloud.

Here’s the hitch

Rapid installation, flexibility and scalability, easy maintenance, unmatched data security, low cost of ownership, smooth integrations, rich features, and mobile access, the upsides of the cloud are many and massive. What merits caution is the transition from an on-premises environment to the cloud and what it entails. With several varying factors dictating the process, the way it’s done is what determines the success of the migration. A robust strategy is an all-encompassing prerequisite whose importance can’t be overstated whenever a cloud migration is considered.

In search of the right partner

From devising the migration strategy and creating & optimizing a cloud governance network to training in-house staff, software licensing, and performance monitoring, the typical migration checklist could be overwhelming. This is where third-party service providers (also called cloud system integrators) enter the scene. In the context of cloud migration, addressing third-party service providers as mere ‘vendors’ is disagreeable; that’s because they catalyze your efforts of smoothing out the cloud adoption journey to make it a success.

But with so many players out there, selecting the right one with a mature cloud offering is an unenviable job. Besides the obvious qualifications such as expertise and competitive pricing, here are a few non-negotiable traits to look for in a potential cloud migration partner.

Relates to Your Vision

All cloud integrators talk of technological excellence but only a few treat the engagement as a long-term strategic move rather than a one-off transaction. Your partner must align with your objectives of opting for the cloud, be it achieving scalability, targeting speed, expanding reachability, or saving costs. Beyond the dictionary meanings of these terms, it must understand what they actually mean to you, which is only possible once they understand your business and its ethos.

The right partner

• Helps you set the order of priority among your needs and goals.
• Delineates the risks associated with the goals and a contingency plan for each.
• Builds a business case and lays out a long-term cloud strategy for you to benefit from the move.

Multiple Cloud Platform Expertise

Prominent cloud migration partners boast of healthy relationships & experience of working on leading platforms such as AWS, Google, and Azure. They have the capability to make your cloud journey a bumpless ride. Their command over the domain is underscored by the frameworks and architecture they use, data management processes, and service status visibility.

The right partner

• Helps you choose the best cloud service based on your needs by factoring in licensing, integration, and other associated costs.
• Determines if your operations require a multi-cloud arrangement and helps you with the prerequisites.
• Creates a data fabric across the multi-cloud environment - a single data source across all data centers to unify the way data is stored, used, and accessed by different clouds.

Agility

The right partner would come in handy when you need to expand your DevOps or infrastructure team or resolve critical issues. It would help you expedite the provisioning and de-provisioning of the IT infrastructure, speeding project delivery for revenue growth and cost reduction. Furthermore, it would leverage automation to re-deploy resources, reducing the time needed by system administrators to manage and support the infrastructure.

The right partner

• Supports agile methods to expedite product development and create marketing programs that align IT infrastructure and management costs with your objectives.
• Enables you to step up or tone down operations to support goals such as attracting and retaining customers or speeding up the time-to-market.
• Redesigns and refactors existing traditional monolithic applications into microservice architectures to facilitate the orchestration of different application services across clusters.

Continuous Optimization

The ideal cloud integration partner brings in accountability to their work and transparency to the way they conduct business. It possesses the infrastructure to respond automatically to workload requirements and dynamically make necessary changes to the setup without manual intervention. It strikes the perfect balance between workloads and infrastructure to ensure peak application performance.

The right partner

• Assesses the current status of your cloud architecture, identifies areas of concrete improvement, and adheres to updated industry practices to make cloud management a breeze.
• Gives visibility into processes, analytics about cloud patterns, and extensive optimization across all cloud environments.
• Drives cloud accountability by understanding trends and analyzing usage patterns of your teams. It gives insights into the consumption of cloud resources to optimize cloud storage and expenses, map consumption, and more.