Finding the best in what each cloud service provider offers has become a standard practice for enterprises. Your IT teams work tirelessly to isolate the most cost-friendly and efficient services and outsourced infrastructure. Any organization benefits when it does not have to manage complex and expensive equipment in-house. It is just a matter of finding the best cloud brokerage company. The issue many organizations are finding is that picking and choosing often leads to working with multiple partners, creating additional logistical and functional challenges.
According to the research firm Gartner, nearly a third of Fortune 1000 companies will soon work with at least two cloud service providers. Every business has its unique challenges and requirements. Successfully implementing a cloud strategy means you need to embark on a rigorous assessment of the cloud services your business is working with. A few means to do so, which experts have concluded on to effectively gauge these services, are listed below.
- Aggregation of services – When employing multiple cloud services, organizations need to have an established method of provisioning, billing, and management. One means of simplifying operations is to have a single, proprietary dashboard for controlling the entire system. This makes a single sign-on model easier to implement and saves time by allowing employees to access all cloud applications from one interface.
- Integrating applications at the service level – Relationships with multiple cloud service brokerages can lead to disparate applications. By linking these, you can save time by having data in the others updated when changes occur in one. Doing so for cloud-hosted applications can save time and reduce the complexity for your employees, IT staff, and managers.
- Customized infrastructure – Perhaps the most significant perk to cloud services is they can be tailored to your individual organization’s needs. Tweaking the service’s capacity, applications, and configuration will help accommodate business processes unique to the company and which change over time.
In addition, your enterprise should look into the strategies each cloud service provider operates by:
- Be sure the provider is not just trying to profit from short-term market opportunities. The cloud should be a solid foundation of their business model and a vision for future services should be in place.
- While cloud technology has emerged over just a few short years, a cloud provider must have experience in enterprise data centers, hosting, and application delivery.
- Customer service should always be available to reduce the technical overhead on your organization.
Finding the ideal cloud service brokerage partnership, therefore, includes a look at your own strategy and the service provider’s model. A multifaceted approach takes some time and effort, but all is worthwhile since the service will set the technical foundation of how your business operates. The assessment stage is perhaps the most important part of the relationship with any provider. By taking this time, you will find a secure, reliable, and interoperable service you can rely on for the long-term. This same service, or a number of them, can function together and grow with your business to help attain success for all parties involved.