Maximizing the ROI of your Cloud Services

Shopping for a cloud provider is a mammoth task. Not only do you have to think about the overall cost of using a specific vendor, you also have to look into things like performance, Service Level Agreements (SLAs) and the vendor’s reputation as a service provider. That’s just the tip of the iceberg. The larger your organization, the more complex your research will be. Now there are even services to help you shop for cloud services. Let’s unpack some of the current realities of shopping for cloud services.

How the Cloud Industry is Shifting

It’s hard to begin to talk about looking for a new cloud provider without unpacking some key shifts in the cloud market. For starters, the market has become massive. You can probably link any popular web technology to a cloud resource of some sort — whether that’s cloud computing, ckup or something complex like infrastructure as a service.

The expansion of cloud technology is helping companies finally make use of the massive amounts of data generated constantly. Before cloud computing, it would have been impossible to collect, organize and tie together all the marketing data available to pull out trends and inform a cohesive marketing push. Now big organizations are concerned with monitoring and analyzing big data in real time. The future of cloud services must have this big data component built in. Additionally, more companies are opting for private or hybrid cloud computing.

Bringing Comparison Shopping to the Cloud

Comparison shopping with cloud services is incredibly complex because there many complex factors to consider. Even with the array of factors to consider, there’s still one major motivator in cloud computing: cost. Traditional hosting requires that clients pay a set fee for a static amount of resources, but few companies have rock steady usage. This leads to companies paying for more resources than necessary for the majority of the time, wasting money. Cloud hosting solves that problem, but there are still differences among cloud hosts, and even among different services offered by the same host.

There’s much more to cloud shopping than considering the upfront cost of securing a vendor. You have to be able to measure one vendor against other providers to ensure that the upfront cost matches up with the computing resources they’re able to offer your organization. The interesting thing about shopping for cloud vendors is that what you need to manage your data right now can easily change in just a few months. This is why cost and features are closely married in cloud computing. You need an affordable solution that offers both high performance computing and scalability.

The Secret to Cloud Service Shopping: Whatever Works!

While this may seem like an oversimplification, it’s actually true. No two organizations are the same, and that means that no two organizations have the same data needs. This is what makes cloud computing so unique. It adapts and it shifts as your needs adapt and shift. So keep fighting for that perfect solution that helps your company deliver a better product. Use the flexibility of the cloud to empower your organization and leave behind the stiff, unyielding nature of dedicated servers.