Seven Demands to make to Cloud Providers

The Guide to Enterprise Cloud progress

The present business environment across industries, which is competitive, dynamic and global in nature has forced CXOs to rapidly innovative, manage cost and align their businesses to stay competitive and meet customer demands. To address this challenge, key technologies like cloud computing have provided substantial advantages like ease of implementation, scalability, security, reliability to drive business momentum. To this end, cloud computing is rapidly changing several enterprise paradigms. Enterprise applications, platforms and infrastructure are steadily migrating to the cloud and are being offered as a service by several enterprises. Traditional Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and system maintenance can be turned on or off on demand, can be scalable, and are priced based on a subscription model. Enterprise security, particularly web and email security, is rapidly being adopted as a cloud based service.

In order to select a cloud provider, an enterprise must be aware about its issues, problems and needs in order to choose smartly from the options availed by the provider; track and monitor systems; and calculate Return on Investment (ROI) and Return on Objective (ROO). To ease this process the enterprise must pen down the list of expectations from cloud providers. To get the most out of the cloud partnership, here are seven points an enterprise needs to demand from the potential cloud partner.he present business environment across industries, which is competitive, dynamic and global in nature has forced CXOs to rapidly innovative, manage cost and align their businesses to stay competitive and meet customer demands. To address this challenge, key technologies like cloud computing have provided substantial advantages like ease of implementation, scalability, security, reliability to drive business momentum. To this end, cloud computing is rapidly changing several enterprise paradigms. Enterprise applications, platforms and infrastructure are steadily migrating to the cloud and are being offered as a service by several enterprises. Traditional Capital Expenditure (CAPEX) and system maintenance can be turned on or off on demand, can be scalable, and are priced based on a subscription model. Enterprise security, particularly web and email security, is rapidly being adopted as a cloud based service.

Align to business objectives and outcomes

Enterprise businesses are not homogeneous and they differ in the nature of needs, issues addressed and problem occurred; cloud should cater to this plethora of requirements and align workloads according to the business objectives and outcomes. Cloud needs to manage revenue generating client-facing applications, common generic applications and specialized genetic applications by providing agile platform and flexible resource usage model which can expand or contract cloud according to usage peaks and valleys.

SPOA – Single point of accountability

A single, trusted partner should be responsible for taking an enterprise through the cloud journey, understanding the environment and helping it to transit incrementally to the desired infrastructure model.

Coexist with existing system

To move to the cloud takes couple of years and multiple stages of transition hence an enterprise needs to plan as how to stay on top of the steadily blurring boundaries between on premise system and cloud.

High Performance and Security

With the increasing usage for mainstream and mission-critical business applications on cloud, security and high performance has become mandatory to support resource-intensive workloads. Security model must have separate layers for physical, data, infrastructure, operations, audits and compliance. The Cloud provider’s performance parameters counts on processing power, memory throughput, file access speed, network throughput, application performance and price-performance ratio.

Data Control

Most of the enterprise businesses need data sovereignty. Enterprise needs control over where the data is physically hosted in order to meet regulatory and compliance requirements.

Meet promised SLA and face penalties on violations

Every Enterprise Business is different and unique hence robust and tailored Service Level Agreement (SLA) must be provided in order to accommodate them. Promising SLA showcase provider’s confidence in its own skin and services which in reward brings trust among the potential and existing enterprise businesses. SLA must draft the parameters for quality of service, state threshold values and abide penalties on violations.

Flexible structure to keep pace with evolving enterprise needs

As and when enterprise businesses grows, requirement changes, expectations increases and outcomes scale up hence cloud providers must be scalable and customizable. A true enterprise-centric cloud provider would be flexible enough to stretch according to needs, transparent about the operations and abreast with latest resources and infrastructure.

Finally, the cloud provider must offer a balance between price and performance. The perception of price-leadership does not translate to the reality of leadership - to support a growing enterprise, more is needed than the cheapest rates.

Cloud Providers offer customized and tailored solutions to a variety of needs and issues. Organisations which have migrated to cloud have enjoyed benefits such as like availability, reliability, scalability, agility, security, high performance and low latency. Such benefits have resulted in improved customer satisfaction, operational flexibility, cost reduction, competitive edge and regulatory compliance.