6 Tips to Help You Choose the Right Cloud Service Provider in 2021

Businesses are heading to the cloud in a big way this year.

According to Gartner, the proportion of IT spending that is shifting to public cloud services will accelerate in the aftermath of the COVID-19 crisis, with the cloud projected to make up 14.2% of the total global enterprise IT spending market by 2024—a percentage that’s up from 9.1% in 2020.

As businesses turn their attention to a post-pandemic world, these rising cloud adoption rates make strategic sense. Across industries, the pandemic revealed a glaring reality: Moving to the cloud has become an immediate necessity rather than an option or future plan. As a result, today’s business leaders are adopting public cloud platforms and cloud-native technologies at a rapid pace as they set their sights on key benefits, like cost reduction, on-demand scalability and business continuity.

Along with this shift to more modern IT solutions, however, comes a new challenge for businesses: Choosing a cloud service provider that’s the right fit for your needs.

To help you get started, Navisite has outlined six key tips that’ll put your business on the right path to the cloud.

1. Take Your Preferences and Experiences into Account

Don’t underestimate the power of first-hand experiences when choosing a cloud service provider. If you or someone on your team worked with a cloud service provider in the past, take inventory of what you liked, didn’t like, and what capabilities were missing from your experience. While this is not the end-all in cloud-provider selection (because some of this input may be biased and personal), your preferences should play a part in any comprehensive, data-driven cloud assessment.

2. Ensure the Cloud Provider is a Team Player

According to an IBM survey, 85% of organizations are now using multiple clouds, of which the majority are public and private hybrid clouds. And while a multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environment can deliver powerful efficiencies and cost savings, it’s crucial each platform works together to realize these benefits. Consider whether a potential new cloud service provider can deliver the interoperability needed to manage workloads across all environments. For example, does the provider offer tools for ingesting workloads from other platforms? A winning combination of cloud service providers will let you move seamlessly between platforms.

3. Consider Your Near-Term Application Goals

Many organizations don’t reap the full benefits of the cloud until adopting a truly cloud-native architecture via platform as a service (PaaS). Getting there, however, can take years depending on the complexity of your applications and transformation goals.

For example, unless your business was built on the public cloud, there’s a good chance your enterprise applications will require some level of refactoring to gain the full benefits of the cloud. To ensure a successful and low-risk cloud migration, you’ll need to consider a phased approach. Which applications do you want to modernize first? And which ones can you continue to run on-premises or in your private cloud? Asking yourself these questions will help you understand the roadmap and capabilities needed from a cloud service provider to reach your goals.

4. Understand Your Physical Dependencies

Newer workloads can run just fine on any virtual platform. But older workloads likely depend on underlying hardware that can’t be virtualized and must be managed on-premises, such as proprietary technology. Moving workloads to the cloud without considering these requirements can have serious cost, performance and security repercussions.

To mitigate these risks, look at cloud service providers that offer a broad range of valuable services that go beyond the platform itself, such as managed hosting, colocation services and other specialized skills that can help optimize workloads across both physical and virtualized environments.

5. Get Informed on Security and Compliance

Security and compliance are consistently cited as top priorities for organizations moving to the cloud. Finding the right cloud service provider, however, starts with understanding your own business’ security and compliance requirements—as well as any existing risks and vulnerabilities.

To zero in on a cloud service provider that can help your business achieve security and compliance objectives, assess your current environment. Key considerations include: 

• Data and IT assets: Organizations should know where sensitive data and IT assets reside.
• Geographic needs: Typically, applications should be hosted as close as possible to the end users to maximize performance.
• Compliance requirements: You should know what regulations you are subject to, depending on the industry, geographic location and other factors.
• Backup and recovery: You need to prepare your systems and people for worst-case scenarios, like ransomware attacks and data breaches.
• Accessibility and control: There should be controls in place to manage access to IT resources and data.
• In-house expertise: If you do not have the right security and compliance experts on staff, you might want to consider outside expertise to help assess needs and cloud migration path.

6. Don’t Get Clouded by the Lowest Price

Many cloud providers have similar pricing or advertise a “better” deal with cheaper terms. It’s best to skip the price comparisons and instead look at two key areas when assessing cloud service providers: fixed vs. metered pricing and public vs. private cloud.

Pay-as-you-go, metered pricing is a great advantage of the cloud, but you may need to pay extra costs if you suddenly have to move a large amount of data. And while fixed pricing lets you plan ahead, it doesn’t account for fluctuations in your business. Ultimately, the cloud model you choose should be based on the maturity, size and scale of your organization—not whatever is the cheapest.

There are a lot of factors to weigh when choosing the right cloud provider for your business. As economic and competitive market forces point to 2021 being a record year for cloud adoption, choosing a cloud service provider that’s right for your business has never been more important. To learn more about selecting the best cloud provider for your business needs, download our eBook: Choosing the Right Cloud Provider for Your Business.