Choosing a Cloud Service Provider

a Cool Vendor in Cloud Service Brokerage.

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Prepared to increase developer productivity?

Get globally scalable apps to market faster?

How do you find the right service provider?

What happens when your needs change?

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Build your workloads profile.

Due diligence on your workloads will identify which are good candidates for IaaS.

Unpredictable loads?

Partial or patterned utilizations?

Scale out (rather than up)?

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The SLA

If something doesn’t seem clear, make note of it and get it explained.

Get full clarity on payback scenarios, and if they fall in line with your acceptable risk levels or not.

Red-line it. Red-line it!

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It's important to note that cloud SLAs vary widely. Lydia Leong, a Queen Bee of IaaS and Research VP at Gartner even went

so far as to call the SLAs of some major providers as meaningless.

understand the language, and get clarity when needed.

understand the value of possible giveback, and how that factors in with your risk level.

use customer references to collect feedback and their experience with the SLA.

treat this stage as negotiation, and maintain a two-way discussion.

Remember to read between the lines.

Don’t get stranded.

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Some countries carry strict data privacy laws, and you may need availability zones you didn’t even know existed.

Make sure your service provider has availability where your users and data are.

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YOUR

DATA IS NOT

SECURE

HERE

Advice: address your risk level to mitigate it.

But remember when buying books on Amazon wasn’t safe?

By defining your level of acceptable risk, your organization’s specific requirements, and any deal breakers you can then ask potential providers how they intend to satisfy your needs.

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Ask for Some Customer References.

Especially crucial if you're looking for managed hosting & IaaS.

Find out about support response, “Unscheduled Upgrades” (downtime!) and overall satisfaction.

Choose: On-demand Software

& Value Added Services

If you already know what stack your application needs, ask if its readily available. Also list additional services you will need,

such as bare-metal on-demand, F5 LBs, DR, etc.

2¢ an hour – looks so good on paper!

But falling prey to VM sprawl and hidden costs

of additional services are inefficiencies that scale,

typically leading to a whopper of a 3rd invoice.

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Be wary of “workload ignorance” and subsequent cost under-estimation.

Collaborate with a cloud service broker to identify cost savings with service providers whose pricing models better match your workload profile.

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Performance reports across a majority of IaaS providers are readily available – but make sure to:

Test drive your own applications.

Identify performance windfalls or choke points.

If IaaS is the long term delivery model for your organization and applications, work with our cloud service brokerage platform to make search, discovery, and utilization of IaaS simple.

Finding the right provider isn’t easy, so ask for an ally.

a Cool Vendor in Cloud Service Brokerage.

Or schedule a time to chat with us and tell us about your unique requirements.

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