Four things to look for when selecting a cloud vendor for AWS & Azure

As with any major IT project, moving a business critical application or data to the cloud carried some risk.

Choosing an experienced and accountable partner to help manage your migration and provide ongoing support is vital in de-risking the project and ensuring that you the goals of the project are achieved.

The risk of a major infrastructure change are particularly acute when the software that is being migrated is at the heart of a business’ revenue model.

Having worked with multiple software providers and indeed coming from a background as an Independent Software Vendor, we believe that IG CloudOps offers a cloud management service that creates better results and which is low risk, affordable, and well supported at every stage of the process.

1. De-risking the project

IT resource is a precious commodity for any business and skills are not always transferable between different disciplines.   While it can be tempting to use internal staff to run a migration process or provide cloud support, this isn’t always beneficial.  Your developers should develop, not migrate, create and maintain servers.

Managing cloud infrastructure can be complex – particularly if you want to reap the full benefits that its flexibility brings.  Rather than going through the learning curve yourself and risk a slowdown in delivering the project, it can be better to outsource the management of your cloud to a fully qualified team who can often be more effective.

Inexperienced or underqualified staff can inadvertently create infrastructure and cost problems that affect you later.

Getting it right first time saves money.

As far as ongoing maintenance goes, the technical experience to optimise the environment, budget, performance, architecture, and availability, while also providing monitoring, security, network management, and patching is invaluable. Choosing the right service and vendor helps you balance those costs for all attributes to deliver the best possible solution for you.

2. Flexibility is vital

At IG CloudOps we focus on engineering a balanced solution that works for you, and create services with flexibility in mind.   It is important to develop a cloud migration plan and architecture that compliments your business goals and timelines while also being open to longer-term change in line with your needs.

During the consultation process, it is essential to investigate what services you need most, but also which benefit your application – this helps you balance cost with performance and creates better results for end users.

3. Budgeting Properly is Essential

The most expensive option is not always best.  With both Azure and AWS it is possible to spec your infrastructure with virtual machines that are optimised for different functionality.  Some areas of your application may require the most powerful resources, while others may not.  We help our clients evolve their applications for cloud deployment.  This can mean long term benefits for running costs, even if there is work to be done up front.

Considering the Total Cost of Ownership is central to a successful deployment.  Our approach helps you understand how your deployment will evolve over time and how this will affect your budget.

To support our clients, we maintain a great deal of flexibility.  We are independent of the major cloud providers which means we can help you host your application in Azure or AWS to give you the best balance of cost and performance and we don’t force clients to use a specific cloud provider.

To us, choosing a cloud provider is like choosing a commodity or brand.  At the end of the day, it’s your choice and all we can offer is our best advice. Choosing a vendor to supply that commodity is again, another choice. And again, all we will do is offer our best advice and all the options available through us or direct with the providers.

4. Access to Support

When you put your trust in a 3rd party to manage a business critical function like application or data hosting, it’s essential that you retain the level of support that your customers need. Being able to get issues resolved quickly is vital.  We provide our hosted clients with high SLAs for uptime and provide clients with support from our cloud experts who can help you solve performance problems and work out if a problem sits with infrastructure or software. Our team is stable and our specialists have been with us since our early years.  

Speak to a member of our team today and see how we can help with a combination of our cloud management platform CloudOps and our cloud experts baing available on demand. 

Or book a test drive and see how CloudOps can change how you manage the cloud.

Featured articles & white papers

Over 70 customers across 8 countries manage AWS & Azure with CloudOps