
Out of all the cloud service providers, how can you pick the best one? You may choose the best cloud provider by following a transparent selection process and giving your unique needs the proper weight.
When To Select a Cloud Provider?

Understanding your business requirements is essential before you can select the right provider. Although it sounds obvious, clarifying your needs and expectations before assessing providers will ensure that you compare them against your list rather than comparing them against another.
This is the fastest way to go from a long list to a short one.
Suppose you are clear on your technical, service, security, and data governance requirements. In that case, you can better question your chosen suppliers.
The environment you choose and the services your cloud provider offers will impact the configurations required, the work required, and the support you receive from them.
Considering that you will need to migrate applications and workloads to cloud solutions services, it is essential to consider these factors.
The optimal time to choose your provider is after you have discovered candidates for cloud migration and when you are analyzing and getting ready to move the workloads.
How Do You Choose A Cloud Service Provider? Consider These 8 Key Areas:

Your requirements and the evaluation criteria when selecting a cloud provider will be unique to you. Some areas should be considered when assessing service providers.
These are grouped into eight sections to make it easier for you to compare providers and find the right provider for your organization.
- Certifications & Standards
- Technologies & Service Roadmap
- Data Governance, Data Security and Business Policies
- Service Dependencies & Partnerships
- Contracts, Commercials & SLAs
- Reliability and Performance
- Migration Support, Vendor Lock-in & Exit Planning
- Profile of the company and business health
Certifications & Standards
Adherence to industry best practices and standards is demonstrated by conformity to recognized standards and quality frameworks.
Although criteria are not necessary to choose a service provider, they can assist you in reducing your possibilities.
If security is your top concern, search for vendors with ISO 27001 or the governments Cyber Essentials Program certifications.
There are numerous standards and certifications available. The organizations in this graphic that provide standards, certifications, and recommendations for best practices are some of the most popular ones.
It would help if you also looked for well-structured processes, efficient data management, and visibility into service status.
You should also know how the provider will support and resource these standards.
Technologies & Service Roadmap
Technologies
Verify if the providers platform and preferred technologies are appropriate for your environment and meet cloud objectives.
Do the cloud providers cloud architectures, standards, and services work for your workloads? Consider how much coding or customizing will be required to match your workloads to their systems.
Along with planning and assessment, many service providers provide complete migration services. Make sure you comprehend the services provided and contrast them with the tasks involved in your project.
Choose who will do what next. Many service providers offer technical support to help you cover the skills gaps in your migrating team.
However, some public cloud providers offer limited support. To fill these skills gaps, you might need third-party support.
Ask the platform provider to recommend third-party partners with extensive experience on the target platform.
Service Roadmap
Ask about the providers plan for service development. How will they continue to innovate? Is their plan in line with your long-term needs?
Its crucial to consider vendor pledges and how interoperability is maintained. Can they demonstrate deployments that are comparable to the ones you plan?
A roadmap for additions, services, and integration is greatly desired, mainly for SaaS providers.
Depending on your cloud plan, you should consider the full range of services that providers offer. This is less crucial if you want to use best-of-breed services from several providers.
However, they must provide a broad range of complementary services if you wish to stick with a small number of major custom cloud services.
Data Governance, Data Security and Business Policies
Data Management
You already have a data classification system in place. This allows you to identify data types according to the sensitivity level and your policies regarding data residency.
You should, at the minimum, be familiar with data privacy and regulatory rules that govern personal data.
In light of this, it can be crucial to consider where your data is stored and the rules that apply there. If you have specific needs or duties, providers that let you pick the country or region where your data is processed, kept, and managed should be considered.
While cloud service providers must disclose where their data centers are, you also must locate them.
Examine the possibility of encrypting data being moved to or within cloud storage to safeguard it during transit.
Sensitive volumes should also be encrypted at rest to restrict unauthorized administrator access. File/folder and client/agent encryption should always be used for sensitive data stored in object storage.
Examine providers data loss and breach notification procedures to ensure that they align with your organizations risk appetite as well as legal or regulatory obligations.
CIF Code of Practice provides valuable guidance that can be used to identify the relevant security and data governance processes and policies as part of a provider assessment.
Information Security
Examine the system and data security levels, the maturity of security operations, and the security governance procedures of the cloud provider.
Your security policies and procedures must explicitly support the providers information security measures.
All user interactions and access can be audited. Clarify your tasks and obligations regarding security as outlined in business policies or contracts.
Standards like the ISO 27000 series or reputable certifications should be adhered to by them. To assure adherence to these frameworks, you can confirm their authenticity and receive guarantees about resource allocations, such as budget and staff.
Ask for internal security and incident reports for any concerns raised. Also, provide evidence of corrective actions.
Read More: All You Wanted To Know About Cloud Computing Solutions In 2022
Service Dependencies & Partnerships
Vendor Relationships
Service providers may have several vendor partnerships, which is crucial to understand.
Evaluating the providers connections with essential vendors, technological prowess, level of accreditation, and employee certifications is necessary.
Can they give any solid examples of environments with several vendors?
The greater ecosystem of services that may complement or support your services should be taken into account. Are there any existing integrations with marketing and finance services, for instance, if you use a SaaS CRM? Is there a cloud marketplace where you can buy other services that are already set up to operate on the same platform as PaaS?
Subcontractors and Service Dependents
It is also essential to recognize any service dependencies or alliances connected to cloud service delivery. On top of IaaS platforms already in use, SaaS vendors can construct their services.
It is crucial to understand where and how it is being provided.
There may occasionally be a complicated network of connected subcontractors and parts to supply a cloud service.
It is crucial that the supplier can guarantee the primary SLAs for all facts of the service and disclose such relationships. Looking over these subcomponents liability restrictions and service disruption procedures is essential.
Consider carefully whether you are considering subcontractors or providers with a long list of subcontractors, particularly when you have data privacy regulations or business processes that are mission-critical.
The Code of Practice demands that service dependencies be clearly defined and that responsibility, accountability, and SLAs are all understood.
Contracts, Commercials & SLAs
Contracts & SLAs
Cloud agreements can seem complicated, and there are no industry standards to help them be constructed and defined.
In particular, many cloud providers who are happy still use unnecessarily complex or even misleading language for SLAs.
The most recent edition of ISO standards for service level agreements, ISO/IEC 19086-1.2016, deals in some way with this issue.
When evaluating provider agreements, this revision provides a valuable perspective.
Contracts can be personally negotiated or pre-set "Terms and Conditions" agreed to online.
The size of the CSP and the customer will determine this. Smaller CSPs are more likely to negotiate than larger ones.
Still, they may be more willing to accept unique arrangements that may not benefit them. Challenge service providers who provide flexible agreements. They must explain the processes, who is in charge, and how they plan to support the variation.
The following are key points to remember when it comes to contracts:
Service Delivery
It would help if you clearly described the service and its deliverables. Clearly define the service and the roles and responsibilities (delivery, provisioning service management, monitoring, support, escalates, etc.) and how that information is shared between the provider and customer.
How are service accessibility and availability managed (Maintenance and incident recovery, etc.) These policies are compatible with your needs.
Protection and Policies for Data
Examine the providers data management and security policies, particularly regarding data privacy regulations. You must ensure adequate guarantees regarding data access, location, jurisdiction, confidentiality, usage, and ownership rights.
Examine the resilience and backup provisions. To understand the transferability of data, review data conversion policies.
Terms for Business
The training module covers many terms. Your circumstances will determine which are most important. However, the following key considerations should be taken into account:
- Service governance and contractual issues, including the extent to which the provider can unilaterally alter the terms or conditions of service.
- What are the policies regarding contract renewals? Exit or Modification Notice Periods?
- Which insurance policies, guarantees, and penalties are included? What caveats?
- To what extent will the provider be willing to expose their organization to auditing operations and compliance with policies?
Legal Protections
Provider contracts should contain standard terms that cover Indemnification, Intellectual Property Rights, Limitation of Liability, and Warranties.
Each should be carefully reviewed. These protections are most often contested because customers want to limit potential data privacy claims after a breach, and providers want to limit liability in case of a claim.
Service Level Agreements
Three significant components should be included in SLAs:
- Service level objectives
- These objectives require remediation policies, penalties/incentives, and other measures.
- Caveats and exclusions.
Generally speaking, service level objectives (SLOs) deal with accessibility, service availability (typically expressed as a percentage), and service capacity (i.e., what is your maximum number of users, connections, etc.).
Accessibility, service availability (often expressed as a percentage), power of the service (i.e., what is the maximum number of users, connections, etc.), reaction time, and flexibility (or how quickly changes are accommodated). Depending on the SLA and contract terms, other ones might exist.
Search for SLOs that are pertinent, precise, measurable, and clear. They should be auditable and stated explicitly in the service level agreement.
SLAs should be specific about how problems are to be located and resolved and for how long. These SLAs will outline the compensation available, the process for logging and claiming, and list terms that limit the SLAs scope and exclusions.
It is essential to carefully examine these terms, as service credit calculations can often be complex. Ask for examples of work or, even better, give all shortlisted providers the same scenario with the same downtime scenario to compare the compensation.
Read More: What Is Cloud Computing In Simple Terms?
Cloud Commercials
Every cloud service provider has a particular collection of services and price structures. For various products, various vendors provide a variety of price structures.
Pricing factors are determined by how long a customer uses a providers services, allowing for savings for longer commitments and minute consumption.
Per-user, per-month pricing is the norm for SaaS-based products. The availability of advanced features, contractual obligations, or storage needs may determine different levels.
PaaS and IaaS pricing models are more precise, providing a breakdown of resource costs or consumption. Flexibility is crucial for both financial competitiveness and availability.
An Application Architecture that lets you scale different workloads independently can help you use cloud resources more efficiently.
Your ability to adjust scalability may be affected by how your cloud service provider packages their services. Youll need to search for a provider that meets your needs in this area.
Reliability and Performance
You have many options to determine the reliability of a service provider.
First, compare the service providers performance to their SLAs over the past 6-12 months. This information is usually available from service providers, but you can request it from others.
Dont anticipate perfection. There will always be downtime. At some point, that will happen to every cloud provider.
What matters is how the supplier manages such rest. The monitoring and reporting tools provided should be sufficient and work with your entire management and reporting system.
Your preferred provider must have defined, tested, and documented procedures for handling planned and unplanned downtime.
They should have established policies and plans outlining how to contact customers during disruptions. Assessing timeliness, priority, and severity falls under this.
When service problems arise, be aware of the liability and remedies offered by cloud providers.
Disaster Recovery
To be sure they can support your data preservation needs, you should look at the providers disaster recovery protocols and processes (including recovery time objectives).
This includes data sources, criticality, backup, restoration, integrity, and other elements.
Each partys tasks and obligations, as well as the escalation process and who is responsible for providing proof, must be specifically outlined in the service agreement.
This is crucial because, in some circumstances, your team may carry out specific procedures.
Consider purchasing additional risk insurance if the providers terms and conditions do not cover recovery costs.
Migration Support, Vendor Lock-in & Exit Planning
Vendor lock-in occurs when a good or service user cannot switch vendors. Proprietary technologies that are incompatible with those of rival companies can lead to vendor lock-in.
It may also be brought on, among other things, by ineffective procedures or contractual restrictions.
Suppose your internal operations and cloud services depend on particular or bespoke components. In that case, you might need help to transfer them to other service providers.
This is especially true for apps that need to be redesigned to function on a platform provided by a service provider.
You can avoid vendor lock-in by ensuring that your selected supplier uses the least amount of proprietary technology.
We are choosing value-added services over those with equivalent or less expensive alternatives. Also, make sure to review your options regularly to minimize lock-in risk.
Be wary of enhancement creep, where service providers alter configurations, policies, and technologies and introduce lock-in elements as part of your service.
While there are many compelling benefits to working with a few key suppliers, you need to balance these benefits against the potential dangers of getting too involved with any one supplier.
Exit Provisions
Also, ensure you have a cloud strategy consulting & implementation for your relationship before you start.
It can be challenging to move away from a CSP service. Therefore, it is worth learning about their processes and procedures before you sign a contract.
Consider how you will access your data, the state it will be stored in, and how long it will remain with the provider.
Profile of the Company and Business Health
While evaluating potential suppliers technical and operational capabilities is crucial, you should also consider their financial stability.
It makes no difference if the supplier offers the most compatible or affordable cloud solution if their business could be more stable.
Make sure your primary suppliers are trustworthy long-term partners.
According to brief provider selection criteria, a provider needs to have a track record of stability, be financially stable, and have the money to stay in business over the long haul.
A service provider can experience financial problems and be unable to compensate for your losses.
Ask directly or conduct your research to find out if there have been any legal problems. Ask about planned corporate changes, mergers or acquisitions, and business aspirations.
To better understand the providers market position and aspirations, you can use analyst profiles, market research, and online reviews to gain a feel for their market standing.
Sometimes, looking at the management teams history via social networks such as LinkedIn can be informative. Do previous roles demonstrate consistent performance and good corporate governance? What kind of customers are they looking for? Which markets are the most important to them? Vertical emphasis could encourage investment in niche products.
Conclusion
When assessing potential providers, take into account both hard and soft factors. Recognize and verify their certificates, the criteria they adhere to, and the feedback theyve received from clients in case studies or reviews.
Consider the long view to preventing lock-in. Later difficulties can be significantly reduced by avoiding proprietary technologies and having a clear exit strategy.
They are taking the time necessary to draft practical SLAs or contractual agreements is crucial. They are the most trustworthy assurance that you will get the services you paid for.