Here’s Some of the Criteria’s to Look for Before Choosing Cloud Database Service
We can see that more and more technology systems and services are outsourced now, and the cloud is changing the IT game altogether. When you think of externalizing your most important enterprise resources like a database, one should ensure picking the right cloud providers to ensure long-term success. However, on getting out to do this, you will find the cloud market is vast, with a myriad of services offering a wide variety of services. Along with the market giants like Amazon, Microsoft, and Google, many smaller players are offering bespoke cloud services.
So, amid all these offerings, how can you choose the right cloud service provider? The choice of a cloud service for each enterprise may differ based on their requirements, but there are some fundamental procedures and procurement processes weighted against your needs that can ensure your success. Here, we list out some of these key considerations to make.
The Timing
“When should I think of adopting a cloud service?”
This is a classic question that is being echoed everywhere. It is important that you need to understand your exact business needs before you get on to choose the right cloud provider. Having your groundwork done well before advancing to explore and assess the providers will ensure that you compare them against the checklist of your unique needs rather than comparing one provider against another. This is the easiest and most effective way to move up from the long list to the most desirable shortlist to make your choice.
To better clarify the technical, support, security, data management, and service aspects, you can more effectively identify, interrogate, and negotiate with your most desirable group of potential cloud service providers. You should be very careful while migrating your data workloads and applications to the cloud. The hosting environment you choose while availing your cloud prover’s services will further determine the configurations, work you do, and the support you get for managed services in the future. So, you should ideally choose the cloud services after identifying your migration candidates and analyzing and preparing your workloads for migration.
Standards
You need to ensure that the providers comply with the global standards in cloud services and adhere to the quality frameworks as per industry best practices to consider them. Even when standards may not help determine the apt service providers to choose, these can surely help choose the best out of the long list of providers. For example, if you consider security as the No.1 priority, you must look for cloud providers complying with ISO 27001 standards or the Cyber Essentials Scheme of the government. Similarly, there are various certifications and standards available in cloud services. Generally, you have to look for structured processes, perfect knowledge management, effective data management, and top-notch service status. Also, consider how the cloud providers plan their resources and ensure adherence to the standards. To know more about security standards in managed database service, you can approach RemoteDBA experts.
Technologies
While thinking of cloud, ensure that the preferred technologies and the platform used by the providers are in tune with your application and database ecosystem or can effectively sync with your cloud objectives over time. Consider your existing workloads and future management preferences to see if the providers’ cloud architecture stays in tune with it. Also, consider the level of customization or re-coding needed on your existing system to make it compliant for these cloud platforms you consider.
As of late, all the leading cloud services providers offer end-to-end migration services down from planning to complete the migration. However, you need to understand the support they offer and map these against your requirements to decide who can do it at best. When it comes to managed services by third parties, often, the technical staff at your end may have some skill gaps.
If the cloud providers offer only minimal support for migration, you have to take the assistance of other third-party migration services to fill these skill gaps. In this case, you need to check it with the cloud platform providers for their recommended third-party migration partners. The latter possess enough experience and knowledge on the targeted cloud platform.
Roadmap
Check for the service roadmap of the cloud provider in terms of their service development. Understand how they innovate and plan to grow? Check if their service roadmap matches your goals and needs over the longer term. Some crucial factors to consider while checking the roadmap are their commitment to various technologies and vendors and how they support seamless interoperability. While considering the provider efficiency this way, you can also check out if they have done similar deployments elsewhere and its success rate.
For the Software as a Service and Platform as a Service provider, it is important to know the features and integration roadmap. Based on your specific cloud strategy, one should also need to evaluate the providers’ service portfolio. With this, you will be able to shortlist a few key service providers for the cloud, and it is essential to make sure that they can offer you compatible services.You may be having your schema for data classification, which defines the data types and their sensitivity and the policies on data storage. At the minimum, you must be aware of the data privacy and data regulatory rules which govern personal data. Keeping this in mind, you need to consider the location where your data resides and the subsequent laws related to data security applicable to it. If you have any obligations or specific needs, you should discuss them with the providers and effectively meet them. Being a critical service, cloud service providers must be transparent and always available. They should disclose the data center locations and the data storage and retrieval procedures to the clients. These things are basics, and everyone may probably know, but when it comes to real-time scenarios, many enterprise decision-makers tend to downplay these, which may put them in trouble over the longer term.
Author’s Bio:
Pete Campbell is a social media manager who has worked as a database administrator in the IT industry. His research has helped thousands of users and brands with marketing campaigns too. He loves to travel, write and play baseball.