What is the best solution in choosing the right cloud provider for your business?
Cloud Computing plays the lead role in today’s digital landscape. Organizations have started to rely more and more on cloud services to run their businesses. Predictions for 2017 estimate that cloud adoption market will grow even further and we are going to see much more enterprises migrating to the cloud in the year to come.
Given this technologic context, organizations are facing the scenario where they need to make wise choices in selecting the most suitable cloud provider. Companies must seek expert advice to correctly evaluate the benefits and risks implied by cloud migration, before starting the actual buying process. There is plenty of information regarding the above mentioned, but none regarding how to assess your cloud provider’s performance without spending a lot of resources, such as time and money.
Two years ago I performed a cloud comparison and review Choosing the Right Cloud Provider for Your Business White Paper to fill in the unknowns and mysteries, providing full and accurate comparison analysis between four different cloud platforms. The primary objective of the analysis was to show how identical configurations and workloads perform within each environment but also how to accurately calculate the real costs of each provider.
The first step to take in comparing cloud providers is to conduct a professional cloud assessment on your current workloads, as well as assessing the compliance, security, SLA and service needs of your business. The results obtained through this analysis offers great insights into how your applications will sync and perform after migration to the selected cloud platforms.
I have completed yet another cloud assessment in 2016, this time using tools such as Docker Containers to make sure the configurations within each cloud provider environment were identical. Using LoadStorm a Cloud loading testing platform, I was able to simulate real life scenarios using virtual users to test where the weaknesses could be found within each environment. With the vast amount of data analyzed I learned that Azure has a kick ass high performance solution that is pricey but compute vs compute has the highest performance, NaviSites’ new NCD platform had the best performance and rock solid reliability for the money, RackSpace’s public cloud operated similarly to the initial tests we ran two years ago and Google inched out AWS in Reliability and Compute performance value(keep a lookout for a future article, AWS vs Google coming soon)
Bottom line, if you are able to asses your current workload needs and accurately compare the workloads between multiple providers, you you help businesses better understand the real costs, risks and benefits of before engaging and migrating to a particular cloud vendor.
Looking forward to hearing everyone’s thoughts, please reach out to [email protected] when you are ready to talk cloud!
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