With so many vendors launching a cloud service, how does a channel player select the most appropriate cloud solution for its client base?
The question is, how do companies evaluate whether a new cloud vendor is simply re-jigging an on-premise product, or whether they are actually a serious business proposition? And how do companies know which vendor is best for business and, ultimately, for customers? Let me work through a few scenarios.
1. Commitment to the country and the region
Even though the Internet is everywhere, location is not meaningless where the cloud is concerned.
The reality is that when applications and data are stored further away, the risks associated with weaker links in the connectivity chain become more apparent. In short, if an application is stored on the other side of the ocean, what will a company do when the connectivity there misbehaves?
Furthermore, it is important to consider the legal implications of company data's physical location. If it is stored in another country, that country's laws apply, and having the best information protection at home cannot help.
Carefully consider where the cloud provider's hosting facilities are located. If they are offshore, the company may be opening itself to legal exposure in a country whose laws the company may not want to understand.
2. Disaster risk mitigation
Channel partners have little control over how cloud vendors respond during an outage or disaster. If the vendor has not invested in data replication, or in a continuity and disaster recovery infrastructure, the risk of the channel partner (and its clients) bearing the brunt of an outage is high. Is that call to a company's client one that the company really wants to make?
How do companies evaluate whether a new cloud vendor is simply re-jigging an on-premise product.
Grant Hodgkinson is channel and alliances director at Mimecast SA.
The question is whether the vendor is providing its service on a best-effort basis, or whether it guarantees its claims to availability with a service level agreement. Essentially, a company needs to know what the vendor will do when disaster strikes, and what guarantees it has that it will be able to continue to deliver as promised.
3. Who owns the data?
Many vendors with on-premise technologies have tried to morph those technologies into something that is "cloud-ready". But designing software for a single-instance deployment and designing a multi-tenanted environment are fundamentally different processes, and addressing this often requires a redesign from the core architecture upwards.
Multi-tenancy means the ability to run multiple customers off a single instance of the technology - all sharing the same physical server and software. A truly multi-tenanted architecture, with data security being top of the list, is what mitigates many concerns about the cloud.
When a vendor has designed a solution with multi-tenancy in mind, customers are able to configure their implementation at a granular level rather than being ploughed into a generic configuration. Also, the vendor can describe how it addresses customer-data privacy concerns.
A small nuance to multi-tenancy is, of course, data ownership. With customers' data being stored (securely) on the vendor's infrastructure, a company needs assurance that the data can be extracted and provided back to the customer easily, and that the customer retains complete ownership of the information.
I have spoken to several disappointed customers who have been dismayed (too late) that they are unable to retrieve their own data once it's out there. Tread very carefully.
4. Hang on to those customers
For the channel to benefit, the cloud solution needs to provide a mechanism for partners to benefit. If a company's role is reduced to that of a transaction facilitator, at some point the supply chain will be reduced and the company will no longer be a part of it. Such are the commercial realities of life.
If the company is able to position its organisation to add value to the platform, it will enjoy a better (and longer) relationship with its customers.
5. ISP agnostic
Carrier neutrality is especially relevant in Africa where communication costs are so high. If the cloud vendor is unable to operate in an ISP-agnostic fashion, the company may need to think about the technology carefully.
If customers need to change their bandwidth infrastructure to connect to the product, perhaps the vendor's cloud is a little too dark for comfort.
6. A true commitment to SaaS
Credible cloud vendors are fast realising that SaaS solutions cannot be deployed to the exclusion of everything else. A more prudent approach is to consider a just-enough-on-site model, where the right amount of capability is implemented on-premise and in the cloud respectively.
It might be appropriate to talk to the vendor about how it embraces integration with third-party applications that reside on-premise, and how it plans to expand this capability into the future.
There are also other areas to consider, some of which are more relevant than others. Nonetheless, a brutal and honest review of the vendor is a critical part of the process. It might be a good idea to engage with this once the company can articulate the commercial benefit to itself and its customers.
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