13 Public Cloud Service Provider Selection Model

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)	Are the SLAs SMART? 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

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