Considerations for selecting cloud solution

Migrating to the cloud is a major move for any organisation. It impacts all stakeholders including the employees, the clients, the executive team and the cloud service provider. So, it is extremely important to consider all the relevant factors before moving to the cloud. The most important ones are:

1.  Business considerations
2.  Data safety and security
3.  Interoperability, portability and integration
4.  Service level considerations
5.  Pricing and commercials
6.  Hosting and geographical considerations
7.  Contingency and recovery management
8.  Ethical and legal considerations
9.  Scalability and flexibility considerations

Business Considerations

Organisations move to the cloud to overcome certain inefficiencies and achieve higher operational parameters. If the cloud vendor is too focused only on delivering technical outcomes, chances are that they may not really understand the business needs of an organisation. Such a partnership that fails to deliver services streamlined to business objectives becomes meaningless.

If you are an organisation in a specific market vertical such as healthcare, banking or retail, it is recommended to choose a cloud service provider with vast experience and expertise in the same industry. Such niche providers deliver optimum results even while playing along with other cloud partners of the organisation.

Data Safety and Security

One of the biggest concerns with moving to the cloud is the security of data that resides in the infrastructure of the cloud service provider. Working with a trusted cloud service provider is the key to managing the various security issues that arise within the cloud. While choosing a cloud service vendor, organisations must consider the following parameters:

•  Regulatory compliance
•  Segregation of data in multi-tenant environments
•  Data recovery
•  Access privileges (logical and physical)
•  Portability of data for business continuity
•  Data provenance
•  Monitoring and reporting
•  Network security
•  Data encryption

The cloud service provider must address each of these criteria with solutions that are in adherence with the requirements of the business as well as the industry. Additional evaluation measures that reflect the unique demands of an organisation must also be considered while selecting the right cloud service provider.

Interoperability

Interoperability is the term used to explain the degree to which different systems or components work together without any glitches. According to IEEE and ISO, interoperability can be defined as the ability of two or more systems or applications to exchange information and mutually use the information that has been exchanged. In cloud computing, interoperability can be understood as the capability of diverse systems to understand the applications and interfaces, authentications, configurations, data formats etc., between public, private and hybrid clouds. This capability helps all the systems to cooperate and interoperate to work seamlessly.

Example:

Google authentication can be stated here as an excellent example for interoperability. Regardless of the device that the user has, all the Google applications share and access authentication data within themselves in a seamless manner. A user can login to Gmail from a particular device and can use all the Google services like YouTube, PlayStore, Google Docs, Google Drive etc. without having to login again and again. It is enough for the user to login to any one of the applications. The data will be shared by all the other apps. This helps the apps to interoperate seamlessly without any glitches.

Portability and Integration

The ability to move an entity between different systems seamlessly to be used on the target system is termed as Portability. The entity could be data or application. Data stored in a particular database should be usable by many systems without the need to re-enter data. This can be achieved by using a common data format for sharing between different services. The syntax and semantics of the data are to be the same for ease of portability. XML is a common format used for data portability universally, and it works really well with multiple systems. Application portability can be defined as the ability to transfer a particular application and/or its components between different cloud services. The application should have the ability to be recompiled and re-linked to ensure ease of portability. Application Program Interfaces (APIs) are universally used routines, protocols and tools to make application portability easier. A good API contains all building blocks of that application to be recompiled and re-linked by different systems.

Example:

YouTube API is a classic example. It lets developers and users integrate YouTube videos and relative functionalities into websites or applications seamlessly. Usually, YouTube APIs include the building blocks for Analytics, Live Streaming, Data Capture, YouTube Player and Click Stream data. Anybody with an embed link (provided by YouTube) can easily integrate the YouTube video in their website or blog. It seamlessly ports all the necessary data and the application as a whole - across different hosting platforms.

Service Level Considerations

When determining the service level of a cloud vendor, there are essentially three factors to be considered, availability, performance and reliability. Availability of the service is determined by the number of “nines” mentioned in the SLA. Cloud service providers generally promise their availability by a guaranteed uptime of 99.9 % or 99.999 % uptime for an entire year.

While availability of the service is crucial, the speed at which it handles the business-critical operations has a direct impact on the business outcome. The reliability of a cloud vendor is determined through its transparency in operations. The cloud contract must include information pertaining to frequency of backups, fault tolerance rate, provider response in case of outages and prior information about scheduled downtimes for maintenance tasks. While the exact location of the data centre may not be revealed, the country or region where the data resides must be known for regulatory and legal purposes.

Pricing Structure and Commercial Consideration

Pricing structure is one of the major deciding factors for startups as well as enterprises looking to move to the cloud. A transparent cost structure that includes both one-time costs as well as ongoing costs must be presented by the cloud service provider. The pricing offered by a vendor may depend upon a number of factors like security level, storage space and so on. In any case, the pricing must be flexible and must not carry any hidden costs. A historical review of the prices offered by cloud service providers may offer some standard insights about their cost structure, and organisations must always ensure that the comparison made between different vendors is strictly apples-to- apples.

Hosting Considerations

Do you have the budget for a private cloud? Is your data suitable for the public infrastructure? Is hybrid cloud the right solution for your storage needs? There are several questions that arise while choosing the right cloud solution for your business needs. Organisations must pick the cloud vendor based on their hosting expertise and ensure that it matches with their cloud requirements.

For instance, a large or medium-sized enterprise looking to move its infrastructure to the cloud can consider AWS, which is hands-down the best provider in this market space. The same organisation must realise that for the expertise of PaaS platform, it must look elsewhere.

Geographical Considerations

Your cloud service provider may carry your data across multiple locations in various geographic regions to mitigate risks such as localized outages, service latency and increased costs. Enterprises must learn about the different locations of their data as the laws governing the storage and use of data vary with different jurisdictions.

Additionally, certain locations may also violate certain regulatory requirements and cause serious threats to data security. Organisations that wish to limit the geographic location on any of the above basis must practice care while choosing their cloud service provider.

While contractual agreement and pre-engagement scrutinizing are the common measures to limit the geographic boundaries of data, enterprises must obtain a clearer insight into the technical controls such as cryptography to ensure maximum protection against such considerations.

Contingency and Recovery Management

The cloud is very vulnerable, and disaster recovery for applications hosted in the cloud must not be assumed as an inherent feature in the architecture of the cloud host. Due diligence for disaster recovery (DR) must be implemented by the client organisation just like it would be performed for their own in-house infrastructure.

The cloud vendor must be prepared to share the documents that explain the various data protection solutions in detail. The client must look for the DR features enclosed within the base price and have a thorough understanding of the vendor’s backup capabilities. Other significant elements to be considered while picking a cloud service provider are DR contingencies, location of the data centre, links with the recovery destinations and data centre hardening features. In short, the cloud service provider must work hand-in-hand with the IT managers to assess risks, determine requirements and architect the desired DR solution at the least possible cost.

Ethical and Legal Considerations

Did you know that the data hosted in the cloud can be scrutinized directly by the government for regulatory and compliance issues? Did you know that your clients can get lawsuits flying for the failure of security and privacy promises made by your cloud service provider? Cloud computing comes with significant ethical and legal considerations, and organisations must acknowledge them to have a smooth relationship with the service provider and to ensure there is no financial loss in the form of legal penalties.

Scalability and Flexibility

The cloud service provider must be able to scale up to accommodate the additional storage requirements and add new users into the system with no difficulty. Alternatively, the service providers must also be able to scale down resources when the organisation is passing through a lull. Such dynamic scaling of resources makes businesses highly agile in the competitive environment.

Every workload within an organisation is unique and demands different configuration and delivery parameters. The right cloud service provider must be able to provide a large range of options pertaining to security, resilience as well as performance, such that the organisation can customise its needs and pay the cost of usage at the workload level.