Updated 5/24/2018
Which cloud platform is right for you?
Cloud platforms are a way of life for many businesses. Cloud platforms empower companies, regardless of size or industry, to connect with consumers, track and analyze customer insights and trends, make data-driven business projections, and keep pace with a rapidly evolving global marketplace. Nevertheless, no two cloud platforms are exactly alike. If a business makes the wrong cloud platform decision, the consequences could impact its customers, its bottom line, and its brand reputation.
At Seamgen, we’ve leveraged cloud platforms since our inception in 2008, and we’ve created solutions on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure and other major cloud platforms. We also realize choosing the right cloud platform for your business may be difficult. Fortunately, we’re here to help you analyze some of the cloud platforms at your disposal, empowering you to make an informed selection.
Factors to consider when choosing your cloud computing platform
- Security: Analyze your cloud computing security goals, the security features offered by each cloud provider, and how a cloud provider safeguards customers’ applications and data.
- Compliance: Check with a cloud provider to ensure it can help you comply with SOC 2, PCI DSS, HIPAA, or any other industry compliance frameworks; otherwise, you risk compliance violations that may put your business in jeopardy.
- Architecture: Consider how a cloud provider’s architecture will be integrated into your company’s day-to-day workflows, as well as your cloud storage architecture options.
- Management: Think about what you’ll need to do to manage a cloud platform every day and the platform’s ease of use.
- Service Levels: Assess a cloud provider’s service-level agreement (SLA); this agreement defines the relationship between your business and a cloud provider in terms of cloud service availability, response time, capacity, and support.
- Support: Review the support options provided by a cloud provider; this way, you’ll know exactly what to do if you encounter any cloud service issues.
- Costs: Look at your budget, along with the costs of a cloud provider and the costs associated with personnel you may need to hire to manage your cloud instances. Find out what tools are available to help you predict and manage cost.
The key players in today’s cloud services market:
- Microsoft®: Microsoft Azure offers more than 100 services and intelligent apps based on data and artificial intelligence (AI) services. It is used by companies across all industries, including 90% of the Fortune 500.
- AWS: AWS offers dozens of cloud products – everything from database architecture services to machine learning applications. Additionally, AWS supports virtually any cloud workload for over 1 million active customers in 190 countries.
- IBM: The IBM Cloud is designed for one-stop cloud computing. It combines a high-performance infrastructure with Watson and machine learning application programming interfaces (APIs) that enable users to build their own apps.
- Oracle: The Oracle Cloud provides enterprise-grade software-as-a-service (SaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), data-as-a-service (DaaS), and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS). By doing so, the Oracle Cloud drives business transformation at companies around the world.
- Google: The Google Cloud blends Google’s core infrastructure, data analytics, and machine learning. It boasts a future-proof infrastructure, serverless provisioning, and other features that make it a top choice for Coca-Cola, Spotify, and other globally recognized brands.
Weighing the pros and cons of cloud computing is a must. Sometimes, creating a checklist that outlines the different types of cloud computing platforms, vendors, and other criteria enables a company to determine the best option. Be sure to consider all of the services you might use, and whether a cloud provider offers all of them..
Cloud providers frequently offer auxiliary services that allow companies to move their entire IT infrastructure to the cloud. These services include network utilities like load balancers, routers, and firewalls; services for scalability like content delivery networks, queues, and caches; and messaging services for email, SMS, push notifications, and much more. Thus, you should explore each cloud provider’s offerings, so you can find out which tools are available to help you achieve your desired results.
Let’s not forget about cloud security, either. App security is a complex problem that most developers cannot solve on their own. On the other hand, cloud security is unparalleled, and many cloud providers offer identity management and authentication infrastructure and highly granular access controls. Plus, cloud providers often have security teams on staff, and these teams empower companies with advanced security to protect against intrusion, malware, ransomware, and other cyber threats.
Seamgen can help you secure the best cloud platform for your specific needs. Our team will help you analyze all of your cloud options and see how each can impact your business. To find out more about how we can help you find and deploy the ideal cloud platform for your business, please contact us today.
