According to research by ESG, the use of Cloud for data protection and availability has increased over the last four years  from 7% to 23%. “As businesses own different requirements, complexities, and goals, the selection of the right cloud service provider has become a tough task for businesses,” stated by ECG.

The cloud industry is full of cloud service providers. They can be hyper-scale public clouds that offer platform services in the form of an off-site backup solution, traditional integrators providing backup services, and Information as a Service (IaaS) providers offering business continuity, and disaster recovery services. Whether you are an SMB or a large enterprise, if you are planning to move your applications to the cloud, you will need a cloud service provider. You need to walk through your goals, requirements, and budget before you hire a cloud service provider.

How to choose Right Cloud Service Provider

Let’s check out some of the most important points you can consider while selecting the right service provider.

Determine What Data to Store in the Cloud

Before beginning with the evaluation of cloud service providers, make sure you understand your business requirements well, which will further help you decide the type of cloud services you want.

You need to figure out whether you want a cloud backup, recovery service, or primary data storage. This will make you clear what type of data you should move to the cloud. Using the public cloud as your primary data storage may create a problem between the WAN and your data center.

Experts advise that cloud beginners should avoid moving new or extremely large data sets to the cloud. They should use datasets that own a small percentage of data. Moreover, you can use inactive data sets or data sets that are large in size but are available in small chunks.

What is Downtime Tolerance?

According to the ESG survey, 75% of respondents said that their downtime tolerance is less than an hour. Here, disk-to-disk-to-cloud services play a major role. What do they( probably two thirds) mean downtime tolerance is that their service providers will be able to retrieve data from a caching appliance and will present a replica copy of their data.

Considering DRaaS functionality behind VM recoverability, cloud service providers that can restart VMs in the cloud in a short time are reliable to avail services from. Do they have preconfigured workflows to achieve the same data quality quickly?

Each service provider has their specific time of recovery, which is important to consider when selecting the right service provider. You have to be careful while considering this point as a single mistake can put your DR strategy at risk.

Regulatory Compliance

You may have to compromise with the compliance of regulatory requirements after storing regulated data in a public cloud, but make sure it does not obstruct your cloud migration. Find an enterprise cloud storage provider that has an experience of working with auditors while capable of meeting the regulatory requirements.

A local service provider would be great if you want to avoid data residency issues. This will ensure comprehensive disaster recovery. Walk through their policies and check whether your service provider is localized or not.

Don’t select a service provider that uses a remote data center if you do not want to face data recovery issues in unfavorable times. As regulatory requirements often change, try to solidify your SLA, which dictates the role of the service provider in compliance.

Conclusion: A rigid cloud platform ensures flexibility and scalability throughout the time you avail services. Ask your providers- do they allow the use of more than one hypervisor? Do they ensure customization? These are a few questions you need to consider. Prepare a list of questions you want to ask your service provider in order to leave no scope for error. No matter if you are new to cloud and its models, you can surf online or take training like Azure training from experts to understand the role of cloud in automation and management.  Remember, a reliable service provider offers a dispersed platform which is innovative enough to meet any business requirements.

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