Once you have decided to opt for a Cloud solution, the next challenge is selecting the right cloud service provider. An analytical approach and well-defined evaluation criteria would be helpful in such scenarios. A snapshot of the criteria is provided in the table below:
Security
|
- Physical security of the location/data centre where cloud service is hosted
- Application & data security
- Security related to multi-tenancy
- Data encryption management
- User access management
|
Quality of Service
|
- Performance guarantees (through SLAs)
- Availability of service
- Service reliability
- Network performance and latency
- Underlying hardware performance
- Scalability of performance
- Incident response time
- Planned maintenance and upgrade downtime
|
Service Level Agreement (SLAs)
|
ο S – Specific
ο M – Measurable
ο A – Achievable
ο R – Realistic
ο T – Timely
|
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
|
- Price – relative to in-house solution, other public cloud service offerings and providers
- Price-to-performance ratios
- Cost for upgrade
- Support costs
- Overhead costs
- Hidden costs
- Total cost
|
Technical Ease
|
- Easy of deployment
- Deployment/implementation lead time and support
- Ease of technical integration and interoperability with in-house solutions
- Compatibility with legacy systems
- Ease of connectivity with cloud solution
- Analytics and reporting access
|
Location and Regulations
|
- Location of data centres (in-country or outside the country)
- Local and international regulations
- Geographic redundancy
|
Disaster Planning
|
- Data centre architecture redundancy
- Backup and failover services and options
- Time to recover down services (including track record!)
- Cloud architecture (disaster avoidance / preventive perspective)
- Location of alternate data centres with duplicate services
|
Service
|
- Support services
- Managed services
- Professional services
- Recovery services
- Service monitoring
|
Others
|
- Sustainability (green data centres and environment efficiency)
- Level of carbon footprint
|