How to choose the right cloud services partner

The importance of being able to rely on an independent partner

When new business needs emerge and we rely on third parties to analyze and identify the most appropriate solutions, the quality of the answers always depends on the partner's areas of expertise and its conflicts of interest. A provider with only large companies in its portfolio is unlikely to be effective in offering cloud solutions for startups. Similarly, a partner with close ties to large international providers will tend to offer, at best, the most suitable solutions from its own provider, not necessarily the best on the market for the specific needs.

Thus, when choosing a partner, experience on similar client companies, substantial agnosticism toward technologies, and independence toward suppliers count. Only in this way can the client have confidence in the proposals and strategic choices indicated by the partner. Differences that may appear unimportant at the beginning of the relationship, in the medium and long term may result in inappropriate choices and lead to higher-than-expected costs and create lock-in, i.e., subsequent difficulty in switching suppliers.

Infrastructure capabilities and environmental sustainability

Business continuity guarantees and systems security on the cyber security front are a priority when choosing a cloud provider. The ideal partner not only has the expertise to ensure the physical security of the data center and to defend customer data from attacks, but can offer compliance with general regulatory requirements and compliances required in the business sectors in which they operate.

Entrusting data processing to a cloud provider's data center reduces environmental impact when it enables the elimination of a large number of small servers and storage systems distributed across the enterprise. In addition to posing security and business continuity risks, more improvised infrastructures, like outdated data centers, carry higher energy costs, both due to inefficient hardware and poor resource optimization with wasted processing power and network bandwidth.

According to European Commission data reported by Bloomberg, data centers now weigh more than 2.7 percent of Europe's electricity demand. An effective cloud strategy improves not only the performance and reliability of enterprise IT but also energy efficiency by moving data and processing to high-density (and efficient) provider servers that are technically state-of-the-art and well balanced in workloads. 
 

The value of a customized offering

The development of cloud services has led to the serialization of service offerings, both by the world's well-known hyperscalers and by other players, with the result that many prefabricated packages are now on the market that are not always tailored to the actual needs, size and budget of the businesses for which they are intended.

The ideal cloud solution changes radically between companies that have their own IT infrastructure and want to use the cloud to accelerate new digital initiatives from those that have chosen to divest the data center by migrating all applications. Similarly, the solution cannot be the same for a company that needs to power trading applications with global access and one that operates in the legal industry locally and needs to safeguard sensitive data of its customers.

The value of the partner is not only in the infrastructure it possesses, but in its ability to provide effective responses to the customer's needs, either with market-standard solutions, if satisfactory, or tailored if, for example, there are special requirements. These include, for example, locating the servers and data center on Swiss territory to ensure that customer data are under federal jurisdiction. Another issue that should not be underestimated is the quality of the SLAs on the services provided and the provider's willingness in customizing them. 

Partner accessibility and consulting capacity

When choosing a partner as a provider for cloud services, it is important to be able to count on experienced contact persons who are willing to engage with the company's contacts to discuss options and identify the best fit for the needs. It is not easy to find consultants at third parties who can explain relevant aspects of the services in an understandable, not just technical, way. This is important when the stakeholders are SME executives or line-of-business managers who have only basic IT skills and little familiarity with the cloud world. For this, the partner must provide customers with experienced people who are willing to study the customer's reality, get down into the problems he or she is experiencing and the business outlook to give really effective answers.

Being able to count on a partner interested in developing long-term relationships with the customer, able to provide advice and support both in the management of contingent projects and in the design of long-term IT strategies is an important added value, particularly for SMEs and all business entities that are approaching the cloud for the first time.
 

The guarantees of an appropriate and predictable solution in costs

The cloud represents a leap in the dark for many companies, and it can really become one on the economic side if the technical terms, contained in contracts, are not well understood at the time of signing, or if gross errors have been made in forecasting workloads. A typical case concerns migrations, from the data center to cloud services, of old applications that are not optimized for the new service-based environments. In these cases there is a risk of running into unexpected costs, sometimes higher than on-premise management of the same workloads. To avoid incurring them, it is important to have a service provider that can offer clarity, an aspect that large hyperscalers, which operate with multinational enterprises with their own consultants and experts, often overlook. Finding out too late that they have underestimated the cost of services can be detrimental to an SME; predictability is as essential as transparency and understandability of contract terms. The partner must make it clear to the client what they are buying and whether the contract contains all the components they need for their needs. Misunderstanding or missing essential components would result in delays and additional costs. Clarity in contract definition and predictability of costs are key aspects on which a lasting relationship of trust with the customer is built.