Signs You’re Working With The Wrong Cloud Partner

Choosing the right cloud partner for your business is a lot like choosing the right life partner — it requires patience, clarity of purpose, and compatibility, with the right amount of differences so your own thoughts and ideas are challenged. In a business environment where cloud is an inevitability, picking the right cloud partner is critical for success. In this blog, we discuss what you should be looking out for and how to figure out if you’ve picked the wrong partner.

An incompatible cloud type

The most basic indicator of the right cloud service partner for your enterprise is whether it is compatible to your own and your customers’ business objectives and needs. Often, organisations, in their haste to sign up with a cloud partner that offers the best deal in terms of cost and performance, skip the important step of analysing whether they need a public, private, or hybrid cloud. This decision is going to be informed by the sensitivity of your data and what you’re going to be doing on the cloud. Public clouds might help lower costs further, but if your business deals with large volumes of customers’ private data or you’re going to be hosting mission-critical information on the cloud, it’s worth investing in a private cloud. Use the right cloud for the right purpose, to avoid the additional cost of correction, if things go awry because you didn’t honour what was specifically stated in the contract, or used the wrong kind of cloud for an objective.

Hidden clauses in the service contract

Be wary of complicated or long-term service agreements that make it very difficult to migrate, or very expensive to end the contract, in case your needs change. Ideally, a good cloud partner should have an independent auditing firm ratifying its processes in the interest of providing optimal service to its customers (you).

Poor responsiveness from the cloud partner
Nothing good can come off a relationship where communication is delayed, and grievances attended to only reluctantly or after multiple reminders. If your early experience with your cloud partner is that they are not reasonably responsive, more likely than not, the situation will probably get worse as you go along. Ideally, part of your due diligence should have been to make enquiries about the cloud provider’s reputation with regard to responsiveness. If you find yourself saddled with a partner who procrastinates, it might be worth considering the option of cutting your losses early, instead of waiting until it gets even more complicated.

Lax security measures to protect your data
If you’re dealing with sensitive data, it is imperative that your cloud partner is taking every precaution necessary to keep it secure while ensuring no laws are broken in the process. If your data is your wealth, you should be opting for a partner that offers customised and sophisticated data security plans. Despite claiming to do so, if you find that your cloud partner has a blasé attitude towards data breaches and privacy, re-evaluate your relationship with them. Independent checks at regular intervals will help you gauge whether your partner is upholding their end of the bargain.

Rigid way of operating

Some businesses need cloud partners that are flexible, and willing to adjust to their fluctuating and changing needs. If you’re one of them, but your partner allows the use of only one hypervisor, makes migration a painful task, or has very little room for customisation, it is wrong for you.

Your cloud partner hasn’t planned and accounted for the future

When it comes to the IT industry, change is the only constant. To be able to serve you for a long time, your cloud partner needs to have a solid future strategy that reflects your own growth vision.

One size fits all approach to picking a cloud vendor

As a business, when you grow, you might consider the idea of moving more services to the cloud. Do not fall in the trap of returning to the same vendor for everything. Your business might be best-served by adopting a multiple-vendor strategy, picking the best vendor for a particular kind of task. The best players in any field are those who pick one thing and do it better than their competition, instead of forcing a diversified offering of many things they are not the leading experts in, down their customers’ throat. Be careful of such vendors, while contemplating expansion.

Why is Monocept the right cloud partner for you?

Monocept can help you quickly build, deploy and manage applications through its global network of managed cloud centres. Through its cloud solutions, Monocept can help an organization increase their business agility and efficiency while reducing costs.

Monocept can recommend the best tools for your migration strategy through which your workloads and applications can be moved to the cloud. Monocept can also recommend the best possible strategy to modernize on Azure cloud through analysis of critical factors.

What’s your Challenge? Let’s work together to solve it.