September 24, 2019 By Karyn Price 3 min read

These are the top five things to look for when choosing an IaaS provider.

As part of the IT channel community, you need to be able to deliver your software and services to businesses quickly, serving them in any deployment model they want to consume. If you’re not already moving to the cloud, chances are you’re evaluating providers and trying to figure out the best way to move forward. With many options of potential cloud partners, your choice may make or break your business.

Service migration can have challenges; the right provider can not only ease your move to the cloud, but can partner with you to enhance application performance, especially when migrating from industry-standard platforms like VMware. Today, we’re giving you our top five things to look for when choosing an IaaS provider.

1. Flexible deployment options

The cloud can provide weighty benefits for service businesses like yours. With hybrid clouds quickly becoming the enterprise standard, customers want an IaaS provider that supports hybrid natively, rather than having to use a third-party platform for management.

Being able to support popular hypervisors or platforms—like VMware—for on-premises, cloud, or hybrid deployments is a big win. Look for cloud partners that can offer the same levels of visibility, control, and operational consistency in their cloud as your customer achieves in their data center.

2. Platform support for VMware workloads

With a majority of on-premises workloads running on VMware virtualization platforms, you need the peace-of-mind that you can migrate your workloads to the cloud without refactoring, rewriting, or changing IP addresses. You’ll also likely want to use familiar VMware-based APIs and tools. Look for providers that work closely and have deep or longstanding history with VMware to ensure their cloud environment can run VMware in the cloud, particularly those that can ensure high-availability on enterprise-grade servers.

3. Security leadership

With security threats and cyber-crime changing and escalating almost daily, partnering with a cloud provider that can ensure strong security practices is of the utmost importance. Your chosen cloud partner must ensure the highest levels of key management encryption and prevent configuration changes through strong role-based access controls. Disaster recovery should be a regular practice, with your cloud provider ensuring the integrity of backup sites when they are used to recover from a cyber-attack.

4. Compliance assurance

As consumer interest in data privacy increases, so do regulations governing how data must be handled. Look for a partner that can help you comply with data regulations across any geography, with the ability to “geo-fence” workloads on trusted servers in any region your customers require. Look also for a partner that can continually monitor for compliance with major statutes and certifications like GDPR, SOC, and HIPPA.

5. New technology integration

One benefit of moving your own services into the cloud is the ability to access and enhance applications with new technologies, like analytics, artificial intelligence, blockchain, machine learning, and other similar tools. You need a provider that has curated a strong service catalog of new technologies that will help you or your customers enhance applications and services.

The cloud partner you choose can help make—or break—your business, especially when migrating VMware workloads. By seeking a partner that can provide enterprise-grade infrastructure, leadership in security and compliance, and deep knowledge and expertise in migrating legacy VMware workloads, you will not only ensure the success of your cloud business today, but will position yourself for success as you grow your services business.

Download the analyst paper and learn more

To learn more about what to look for in a cloud provider that supports VMware workloads, download the analyst paper from Frost & Sullivan.

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