How to choose a public-cloud provider

So, your organization has decided to move to the public cloud and harness the many benefits that it has to offer. One of your first questions will be: which public-cloud provider should we use?

Organizations most often opt for one of the big three: Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud Platform, although other options exist too. While many of the large players offer similar services, there are nuances and differentiating factors to consider.

When you’re looking at which workloads to move to the public cloud and where to move them, keep the following in mind:

• Your existing public-cloud footprint: If this isn’t your first foray into the public cloud, it can make sense to migrate future workloads to the public-cloud environment you already use. Many organizations do this for several reasons – for example, to leverage internal expertise or take advantage of the discounts and incentives that public-cloud providers may offer when you stay with them and expand your usage.
• Costs: “Where should we run this?” is a question we often hear from our clients, followed by “What will it cost?” In cases where the services on offer by public-cloud providers are relatively similar, organizations often look at where they can accomplish their cloud goals in the most cost-effective way.
• Availability service level agreements (SLAs): Downtime frustrates users and may have major financial ramifications. So, organizations often factor availability into their cost comparisons along with estimated revenue lost because of downtime. For each public-cloud provider you’re evaluating, look at the availability SLAs for the services you intend to use. For mission-critical applications, high reliability right out of the box is an important consideration.
• Existing software licenses and operating systems: You can run your workloads on any public cloud, but organizations often prefer environments based on their software licenses and operating systems. For example, many Microsoft Enterprise Agreements extend to the public cloud, making it financially compelling for large Windows users to migrate to Azure. On the other hand, organizations with Linux environments often select AWS, which offers many services that work well with Linux.
• Speed of deployment: Public-cloud vendors offer various provisioning and automation tools for application deployment. Look at the automation methods they give you and how quickly they run. Minutes versus hours can make a big difference, especially when you need to scale your applications rapidly and on-demand.
• The “latest and greatest” factor: How current are the operating systems, products and services offered by the public-cloud vendor? Many organizations want access to the latest versions and tools as they’re released, and they factor this into their public-cloud decisions.

Evaluate your public-cloud options with us

We can assist you at all stages of any cloud strategy –public, private, hybrid and multicloud.

This includes helping you evaluate public-cloud providers to find the ones best suited to your organization’s needs.

We pride ourselves on a cloud-neutral approach and have extensive expertise and experience across all cloud environments. From cloud planning and migration to management and modernization, we help you reduce costs and complexity, increase scalability and resilience, and achieve your business goals.

Whatever you select, we’re here to help maximize your success, every step of the way.

Learn more about our Managed Cloud Services.

Mark Paterson is Senior Vice President, MCIS: Go-to-Market and Product at NTT