The various cloud offerings are reaching maturity. The other side of the coin is how to select the offer that best suits your needs and specific requirements. Various criteria need to be closely studied. And choosing the right Cloud Provider becomes a strategic decision.
SaaS (Software as a Service) is the most mature public cloud market. But this market is dominated by five suppliers (Microsoft, Salesforce, Oracle, Adobe and SAP), who take half the cake.
IaaS is also dominated by five providers who accounted for nearly 80% of the global market share in 2018.(Amazon, Microsoft, Alibaba, Google and IBM)
For PaaS, Gartner reports that only 10 of the 360 vendors are able to offer 10 or more of the 22 services described in its report. This leads most providers to focus on a single, custom-tailored PaaS offering, rather than a multifunctional solution.
The diversity of cloud offerings and the integration of innovative tools confirm the predominance of the cloud in any digital transformation project. But which solutions should you choose?
The decision is often a simple one for organizations that have already been on a specific cloud for several years, and have therefore adopted one provider. For any new workload migration, or to create cloud-native applications, this provider is often the preferred choice. Mainly for reasons of consistency and trust.
The situation is trickier for companies that have only moved a few workloads to the cloud, or none at all. Choosing a service provider isn't easy. Above all, it's difficult to make an accurate comparison, as offers are constantly evolving.
Which applications to migrate?
A holistic approach is needed to identify the most appropriate solution. The decision should not be based solely on service offerings. But also on an understanding of internal business and technical requirements. And on the challenges faced by the organization in moving workloads to the cloud.
It's essential to understand expectations, and to be clear about what needs to be achieved by moving to the cloud. First and foremost, it's essential to determine which workloads could (or should) be transferred to the cloud (when migrating for the first time) or to another provider (when changing providers). Are we talking about specific applications, or hundreds of machines and virtual applications?
As well as discussing with the relevant business and IT teams whether it's right to migrate a particular application to the cloud, there are other important questions to ask: are we leaving a datacenter because a lease is expiring, because the hardware is ageing, to strengthen disaster recovery, or to save money?
The move to the cloud also challenges existing processes. There are impacts on financial processes (shift from CapEx to Opex with variable monthly fees), application development, team composition... In parallel to changing processes, a change of mindset within the organization is essential to ensure the success and longevity of this project.
The devil in the details
In addition to technical, strategic and regulatory issues, you need to ensure that the supplier meets your support and recovery requirements. What kind of support and response times does it offer, 24/7? What will be the level of commitment?
It is therefore essential to study the SLA (Service Level Agreement) in detail in order to benefit from the best service guarantees. This document, which contractually defines service quality, must detail four crucial parameters:
- Technical scope: number of virtual instances and/or physical servers, storage space, etc.
- The SLA indicator: in the case of availability, the percentage is very close to 100% (99%, 99.9%, 99.99%...). Relative to the number of minutes in a year, this means barely 4 hours of downtime.
- The time frame to which this guarantee applies: 365 days x 24 hours, for example.
- Exclusions: maintenance range, customer liability, etc.
Finally, don't forget that the devil is in the detail! Offers from different suppliers may seem similar at first glance. But on closer inspection, you may discover specific technical features (or lack of them) or small paragraphs in the general terms of service that can be decisive in the decision-making process.
The cloud has come of age, and the solutions are innocent. Today, this is a given. But not all companies wishing to migrate to the cloud (or to reinforce its integration into their IS) may be familiar with the subtleties of this constantly evolving universe. More than ever, it's a wise decision to be accompanied by a Cloud Provider.
