How To Shop For The Right Cloud Service For Your Business?

To beat the intensifying competition level, all you need is to apply smart working techniques in your company so that you attain high level of efficacy with least capital expenditure and at the same time you have the flexibility to work the way you want. Your every attempt of incorporating new technology in the working of all the diverse departments of your organization will be a huge success if you utilise the contemporary and revolutionary way of storing, synchronising and sharing your documents via the cloud computing technology.

It doesn’t matter whether your company is a small enterprise or a huge business venture as cloud services have become the need of the day. The cloud services can be customised as per the users’ demand and since the cloud service vendors provide all the essential hardware and software, the company is free from the responsibility of deploying their own infrastructure and maintaining a dedicated IT team for regulating the systems.

Without any worry about the capital required to be poured in for purchasing servers and maintaining them on-site, companies can hugely augment the productivity as employees can have easy access to all the vital documents stored with the cloud service provider’s server any time and at any location. But every business has its own cloud service requirements and not every vendor or every free service ensures that you get all you want in a said plan or package. Since you desperately want to make utmost use of cloud computing technology that allows your business to have a virtual identity, you must make an in-depth analysis about how to pick the right cloud service for your business:

1. Choose Between Freemium Or Paid Services

There are many cloud computing service providers that offer freemium service for storing upto 100 GB of data. In case your company expands and you now require more space, then they offer the extended storage space at additional charges. You can even choose services that offer you huge storage space at economical charges. One of the flaws of freemium services that has been a matter of discussion among entrepreneurs is in its terms of offering additional space at a cost that is higher than those paid only services in a bid to cover the services that were rendered at no cost. So the decision of choosing the kind of service depends upon the size of your company, the estimated storage space and its predictable growth in the future.

2. Make An Analysis About Your Requirements

There are various cloud service providers who specialise in various services. You need to make comparisons between the providers that encompass the kind of services you require. Then you need to ascertain the price feasibility keeping in mind that in case your business expands, the provider must be able to cater to your increased requirements. You must also keep the agreement terms clear so that you don’t have to pay extra amount later when you initially paid for a cheaper package. When you are unsure about the period by which your business can be scaled up or down, you must sign up for a cloud account that offers flexible pricing.

3. Collect Information About Capacity & Withdrawal Terms

Since the cloud computing service provider is a third party, you must ensure that in case the provider’s terms and conditions change or your business has decided to handle the storage and file synchronisation services on its own, then you are free to withdraw from the services and get full control of your data. Moreover, if the company is offering cloud services at a lower price but has capacity constraints, then your data storage requirements will have to compromise. It is therefore essential to keep full information about the capacity or your business will have to suffer due to the inappropriate choice.

4. Know About The Provider’s Expertise & Reliability

You don’t want your company’s potential information to be lost at the hands of inexperienced service providers. Wisely choose a cloud service provider, who is known as an industry expert or works within the set standards and is extremely familiar with almost any software that your company wants to use. Besides expertise, checking about the reliability of handling your entire virtual business operations while consistently managing robust bandwidth and data sharing in uptime is extremely crucial for seamless working on the cloud.

5. Gauge About The Provider’s Financial Stability

Keeping a track of the financial status of the prospective cloud service vendors is essential when you are taking this major decision of choosing one among them. The rich experience, market standing, earnings and financial reports will provide the base for deciding whether the vendor you are dealing with is financially stable or not.

6. Opt For A Customer Oriented Provider

You cannot rely on a service provider if its motive is to just sell the service and manage it remotely without providing effective and timely assistance. You need to search about the customer’s feedback regarding the cloud service vendor and know whether it provides 24/7 chat, call or e-mail assistance. You can even discuss about your short-listed vendor’s list with your IT employees so that you can take into consideration their feedback while choosing the right vendor.

7. The Service Should Be Easily Manageable

Your IT staff should not have a hard time dealing with the management work of the cloud provider’s hardware and software. It should be easily manageable, highly efficient in terms of ease of control with simple processes. Also the service must have transparent terms so that all the clauses relating to the management of data and security is not compromised at any cost.

8. Ease Of Integration

Many times, when companies want to migrate their operations to cloud, then they are bit sceptical of leaving their widely used on-premise working environment. But when you know that going with the trend will help you expand your business operations, then find a cloud service vendor who offers easy and flexible integration of current network resources with the cloud apps and servers.

9. Choose Provider Who Takes Ownership Of Network

This is one of the main benefits of opting for an experienced cloud computing service provider as they are able of providing robust, secured and uninterrupted network connectivity. The vendor must be capable of managing upcoming threats on their cloud network and must take complete responsibility of the cloud infrastructure along with maintaining the privacy of your company’s documents.