What to look out for when evaluating potential cloud providers?
The lack of a standardized methodology for evaluating Cloud Service Providers (CSPs), along with the reality that no two Cloud Service Providers are alike, complicates the process of picking the best one for your firm. This post will help you work through the characteristics you may use to pick a supplier that can best meet your organization's technological and operational demands.
So, how do you go about selecting a Cloud hosting provider? To begin, it is useful to understand who the primary players are today.
The Players#
The sector is crowded, with the big three — AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Services — as well as smaller specialized firms. Of course, AWS, Google Cloud Services, and Azure reign supreme. There are many cloud providers in Singapore such as NIFE, which is a developer-friendly serverless platform designed to let businesses quickly manage, deploy, and scale applications globally.
Criteria for Primary Evaluation#
When deciding which Cloud Service Providers to utilize, consider the alternatives that different providers supply and how they will complement your specific company characteristics and objectives. The following are the main factors to consider for practically any business:
1. Cloud Security#
You want to know exactly what your security objectives are, the security measures provided by each provider, and the procedures they employ to protect your apps and data. Furthermore, ensure that you properly grasp the exact areas for which each party is accountable.
Security is a primary priority in Cloud Computing Services, therefore it's vital to ask specific questions about your specific use cases, industry, legal needs, and any other issues you may have [(Kumar and Goyal, 2019)]. Do not fail to assess this key element of functioning in the cloud.
2. Cloud Compliance#
Next, select a Cloud Computing Service that can assist you in meeting compliance criteria specific to your sector and business. Whether you are subject to GDPR, SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, or another standard, ensure that you understand what it will take to accomplish compliance once your apps and data are housed on a public cloud architecture [(Brandis et al., 2019)]. Make sure you understand your duties and which parts of compliance the supplier will assist you in checking off.
3. Architecture#
Consider how the architecture will be integrated into your processes today and in the future when selecting a cloud provider. If your company depends heavily on Amazon or Google Cloud Services, it could be wise to go to such Cloud hosting providers for ease of integration and consolidation. When making your selection, you should also consider cloud storage designs. When it comes to storage, the three major suppliers have comparable architectures and offer a variety of storage options to meet a variety of demands, but they all have various forms of archive storage [(Narasayya and Chaudhuri, 2021)].
4. Manageability#
You should also spend some time establishing what different [Cloud hosting providers] will need you to handle. Each service supports several orchestration tools and interfaces with a variety of other services. If your firm relies heavily on certain services, ensure that the cloud provider you select has a simple method to interface with them.
Before making a final selection, you should assess how much time and effort it will take your team to handle various components of the cloud infrastructure.
5. Service Levels#
This aspect is critical when a company's availability, reaction time, capacity, and support requirements are stringent. Cloud Service Level Agreements (Cloud SLAs) are an essential consideration when selecting a provider. Legal considerations for the security of data hosted in the cloud service, particularly in light of GDPR rules, should also be given special consideration [(World Bank, 2022)]. You must be able to rely on your cloud service provider to do the correct thing, and you must have a legal agreement in place to protect you when something goes wrong.
6. Support#
Another factor that must be carefully considered is support. In certain circumstances, the only way to receive help is through a chat service or a contact center. You may or may not find this acceptable. In other circumstances, you may have access to a specialized resource, but there is a significant likelihood that time and access will be limited. Before selecting a Cloud Computing Services, inquire about the amount and type of assistance you will receive. The cloud providers in Singapore like NIFE provide excellent customer support.
7. Costs#
While cost should never be the sole or most essential consideration, there is no disputing that price will play a significant influence in determining which cloud service providers you use.
8. Container Capabilities#
If your company wants to move its virtual server workloads to containers, container orchestration, managed containers, and/or serverless architecture, you should thoroughly examine each Cloud hosting provider's container capabilities. The cloud providers in Singapore like NIFE use Docker Containers.
References#
Brandis, K., Dzombeta, S., Colomo-Palacios, R. and Stantchev, V. ([2019]). Governance, Risk, and Compliance in Cloud Scenarios. Applied Sciences, online 9(2), p.320. doi:10.3390/app9020320.
Kumar, R. and Goyal, R. ([2019]). On cloud security requirements, threats, vulnerabilities and countermeasures: A survey. Computer Science Review, 33, pp.1-48. doi:10.1016/j.cosrev.2019.05.002.
Narasayya, V. and Chaudhuri, S. ([2021]). Cloud Data Services: Workloads, Architectures and Multi-Tenancy. Foundations and Trends® in Databases, 10(1), pp.1-107. doi:10.1561/1900000060.
World Bank. ([2022]). Government Migration to Cloud Ecosystems: Multiple Options, Significant Benefits, Manageable Risks.
Wu, Y., Lei, L., Wang, Y., Sun, K. and Meng, J. ([2020]). Evaluation on the Security of Commercial Cloud Container Services. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, pp.160-177. doi:10.1007/978-3-030-62974-8_10.