Ascend to the cloud successfully with a good channel partner

When most organisations think of the cloud, they often associate it with big tech public cloud vendors such as Azure, AWS or Google. Many are already embedded with these vendors to some extent, particularly Microsoft. In theory, this makes it an easy choice for organisations to default to their cloud offerings. However, that could be a costly mistake.

Engaging with customers and peers to understand challenges

Understanding that many existing customers will follow the logic that (a) we should keep all our services with one provider for ease of management and (b) it's surely better the devil you know, does not encourage big tech to offer anything particularly competitive. In fact, it's much more likely that such unquestioned trust will be exploited and their customers will unwittingly pay more for less. This is especially the case when looking at Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS).

This is why it's important to ask the following questions:

• What will this actually cost, based on realistic usage over a period of three to five years?
• How will performance compare to what we have been used to with our previous infrastructure stack?
• How will the service support our strategic business and operational goals?
• What wider strategic benefits will it create?
• How do I extract myself if, for whatever reason, this does not work?

Business leaders should also actively engage with their peers, asking them what strategies they're using, the outcomes they've seen and what other options they've considered. Failing to undertake this critical due diligence could cause major problems of overspend, underperformance and long-term lock-in, factors that can be make or break for many organisations.

Tapping into channel partners to meet business requirements

It is important to understand that there is a much wider landscape of cloud options, many of which could be more suitable for your business. Of course, this can be over-facing if you do not keep up to speed with the latest technical developments and market offerings, which is where channel partners come in.

Channel partners should be investing in research and assessment to ensure they are aware of the latest technical offerings, how they compare and what might be useful to their customer base. They can assess an organisation's specific requirements and identify appropriate solutions. This does not excuse businesses from undertaking their own thorough due diligence - as only they will truly know their own business - but a channel partner can be an effective filter, providing a sensible shortlist of options and saving on a whole lot of grunt work.

Aspects to be considered should include dedicated versus dynamic resources, system resiliency, security implications, performance (including the underlying tech stack and component types), ease of management, necessity for any external consultancy, data location(s), recovery capabilities, connectivity (from all potential working locations), sector specialism, carbon impact, ability to egress and - of course - pricing structure and service terms.

Choosing the right cloud provider for your workload

By taking a look at both private and public cloud, it's obvious that many cloud providers are simply reselling big tech solutions, maybe with their own branded interface. Private cloud solutions are likely to be more tailored to specific industries and needs, incorporating more innovation and are more competitively priced. But they cannot take their customers for granted. Innovation occurs with the support of forward-thinking customers.

After an exhaustive review, it is certainly possible that public cloud still ends up as the best option. But it is important to fully understand this before making a commitment. This is particularly important to organisations that require more than basic levels of compute and low levels of storage. In such cases, a specialist provider is almost certainly the way to go, so long as they can provide the relevant assurances around the questions outlined above.

So, don't default to public cloud. Don't assume the decision to move your services to the cloud is necessarily an easy one. Find a good channel partner and undertake the work to ensure your business ascends to the cloud successfully.