Tips for choosing a business CSP

This may not be a totally original approach, but providing a list of questions that users need to answer is still a good way of getting a user community to address the issues that are currently important. This is particularly so with the cloud, where delivering a service – and that often means the service delivered to the customers of a business using the cloud – is far more important than the technology used, or the costs charged, for that service.

On that basis, the following list from Carrenza, provides a good debating point. The company describes itself as an end-to-end cloud services provider, though it might be more appropriate to say end-to-end business services delivered in the cloud.

And that, for many businesses, is the point at issue here; they can go to the likes of Amazon and get brilliant cloud resources and services at wonderful prices. But by and large they are then responsible for everything else, from service development upwards.

If, on the other hand, businesses want to get on with their core business and leave the technology to others, then choosing a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) with that level of understanding and expertise is probably a good idea.

So here, as a debating point if nothing else, are the company’s five `top tips’ that it feels businesses should look out for when selecting a cloud provider.

CSW has taken the liberty of adding some additional thoughts in italics.

1. Prioritise flexibility

Selecting a service that has the flexibility to adapt to your evolving requirements is a must. Companies should just need to focus on what technology solutions will be best suited to their needs now, not how they will change in the future.

Flexible pricing models will be essential to many firms. It's impossible to predict what your business will look like two, five or ten years down the line, so you need to have confidence that your cloud solution will be able to offer you exactly what you require without charging you for resources you'll never use.

CSW Additional Thought: Businesses do actually need to think of how and where they are evolving first of all. Many seem to growth from specific project to specific project, which may have made sense in on-premise environments. But the wide, and growing range of cloud services available means that can now plan more easily for potential growth and development as the applications, services and compute resources can be readily sourced. So how and where do you want to source them in the future – for ease of management, or service reliability perhaps – become important questions. Get that piece sorted as early as possible and it can free the business to concentrate on its core business, rather than arm-wrestling the technology options, as of old.

2. Know where your data is

Data governance and protection is a principal concern for businesses at the current time, particularly as organisations falling victim to breaches never seem to be out of the news. You'll need to know the physical location of any external datacentre your information will be stored on - as it might be subject to different regulatory requirements from your home market. You should also ask questions about the security of datacentres that are not under your direct control in order to get peace of mind your confidential information is protected.

CSW Additional Thought: Businesses also need to be more clear these days about what type of data they are wanting to store. Governance and compliance issues often only apply to certain types of data – customer and supplier records, financial transaction data, company accounts and the like. This is no different to the discussion that will be needed on what data and applications are still better run on-premise. But other types of data, for example Terabytes of product brochures in .pdf format, might be stored at lower cost in a different datacentre. The balance then is between cost and the reliability of the service in delivering that data back in a timely fashion, when it is called.

3. Examine what they offer

As well as the core services to move your IT operations into the cloud, look at what additional offerings are available. For instance, business continuity and disaster recovery plans may be an essential consideration, particularly for small and medium-sized businesses.

Many of these firms may never recover from a serious issue if they do not have these provisions in place, so selecting providers who can help support these areas could be an invaluable safeguard for the company.

CSW Additional Thought: Just a short comment here – Yes, do not forget this. The cloud can provide a wide range of business continuity capabilities very easily – almost as a by-product of its very existence. But that does not mean businesses can forget about things like Disaster Recovery. They need to be explicitly specified as part of the contract. Traditionally, smaller businesses have taken the risk of a disaster because of cost issues. The one thing the cloud does do here is reduce that cost issue to a point where taking the risk is an act of folly rather than a `reasonable gamble’.

4. Do they emphasise automation?

One of the key benefits of selecting the right supplier is the amount of time and resources it can save by automating many manual processes, which can often be tedious and lead to IT projects taking longer than expected to implement. With a cloud provider that has automation as a priority running through all its activities, you can greatly streamline your operations and save time and money for use on more important things.

CSW Additional Thought: It is perhaps fair to observe that setting up such automation will most likely involve some level of `consultancy’ service, which will come at a cost. The other side of that is the fact that, once automated, the operational costs of any production service is likely to be much lower over the long haul. So again, it is a balance that has to be discussed in advance. A couple of observations here: don’t forget to ask the CSPs what functions and processes they have already automated, they may have solutions that will only require optimisation rather than full development; secondly, the coming thing in automation is autonomics – the ability of the service to `learn’ a process and self-automate subsequent, similar processes – so ask if that is available. It could be helpful if your business is changing and developing at a reasonably fast pace.

5. Consider multiple vendors

A big benefit brought about by cloud computing is the ease and flexibility organisations now have in working with multiple providers to use the best-fit solution for each individual requirement. As opposed to the existing, and more common, practice of compromise and trying to work with a single provider for all requirements.

This isn’t just about using multiple SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions as often quoted, instead organisations should also look to use multiple infrastructure hosting providers as well; selecting based on workload, security and other considerations pertinent to each requirement. This flexible approach means IT departments are able to solely focus on meeting the needs of the business whilst reducing the need to prioritise departments and application functionality.

Moving to the cloud can be a complex venture. It is therefore essential to work with a trusted advisor with proven experience and expertise in delivering business systems in the cloud.

CSW Additional Thought: As per an additional thought above, using different CSPs for different service requirements is a sensible approach – for those with long memories it is why the `packaged application suite’ model from the 1980s proved to be a failure. `Horse for courses applies in the cloud as anywhere else. And though that last sentence can be seen as a `pay-off line’, there is an element of important truth in it. Are you looking for a cloud service based on the technology resources available and price being charged. If so there are many big name options available. If the need is to have a business service running as efficiently as possible, so it produces the minimum inconvenience to running the core business and allowing it to grow, then questions like these above do need to be asked and answered.

There are undoubtedly more questions that could be asked, and if readers have other suggestions CSW would love to receive them.