So, you’ve made the decision to embrace the cloud. Your organization joins countless others in leveraging cloud technology to drive digital transformation. Recent research indicates most business enterprises are integrating cloud computing, either fully or partially, into their IT strategies for its enhanced reliability, scalability, security and efficiency.
Now that you’ve determined cloud adoption is right for your company, critical decisions lie ahead. Among these decisions, one stands out as particularly crucial – selecting a partner who understands your organization’s specific challenges and objectives. A quality partner should guide you through every step of migrating workloads to the cloud, ensuring the effectiveness of your cloud journey.
Why finding the right cloud provider is essential
Cloud use continues to increase as companies struggle to keep up with ever-expanding demand for greater digital bandwidth and data storage. Market statistics illustrate the upward trend. According to Gartner, more than half of enterprise IT spending in key market segments will shift to the public cloud by 2025, while a report from Synergy Research Group showed cloud revenues reached $544 billion in 2022, up 21% from 2021.
With the growing prevalence of cloud comes a flurry of partner interest — meaning there are more cloud providers than ever before seeking to serve your business. As more providers enter the market, it can be difficult to choose the best partner to meet your needs. But it’s critically important considering the many adoption challenges the right partner can help you resolve. A few examples include:
- Assisting your organization with developing a project road map.
- Helping you determine which workloads are best suited to the cloud.
- Ensuring increased cloud consumption is tied to actionable business outcomes. such as faster time to market, improved analytics and lower costs.
- Helping you navigate challenges brought on by legacy systems and ensuring the implementation of a scalable cloud model.
- Providing the utmost in cloud security and managed services, including strong Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS), Backup-as-a-Service (BaaS), as well as comprehensive threat monitoring and alert systems.
Where to begin your search
Choosing the right cloud candidates for consideration is vital and requires some upfront work. The following are a few tips as you start your search:
- Do research: Explore the websites of cloud providers to understand the services and solutions they offer. Ensure these solutions match your needs. Part of your research may involve talking to an industry association or fellow business leaders to hear about respected providers in your area of business.
- Look at experience: Look at your potential partner’s past projects. While industry experience is important, almost all large global system integrators have strong industry experience. Consequently, looking for specific experience in your business segment as well as compliance certifications (for companies in regulated industries) can be differentiating factors.
- Find the right resume: As a potential client, you should look for partners who understand how the cloud enables better outcomes like time to market, access to data and customer experience. Understanding the implications to software delivery, operational processes and people is critical to deriving value from the cloud.
- Get quotes and referrals: Ask each cloud provider for a quote on the services and features you need. As you narrow your list, ask for customer referrals to gather firsthand information from people who have used the provider’s services.
What to ask your potential cloud partner
Talking to potential partners about their latest thinking on how to leverage the value of cloud can be a telling conversation. A few questions to ask include:
- What projects has your organization worked on that had similar goals to mine?
- What lessons did your organization learn from those projects? How will that carry over to my project?
- How might your company’s core values influence our partnership? (A partner whose core values are client-centric will create the best outcome.)
Ultimately, you’ll know you’ve picked the right cloud partner if the two of you share an aligned vision, a focus on outcomes and mutual trust. These are the essential markers of any strong partnership and will be a winning combination for years to come.
LightEdge can help
If you’re looking for a partner in the Minneapolis area that can help you leverage the cloud, LightEdge is ready to help. We’re a leading provider of secure cloud and colocation and recently acquired a Tier III data center in the Minneapolis area.
Our team will assess your current technology footprint and business objectives to plan a cloud transformation that creates real value for your business. With LightEdge as your trusted cloud partner, you’ll enjoy a high-performing, secure and compliant network along with a team that prioritizes working closely with customers to ensure successful outcomes.
To learn more about how we can help you optimize your cloud strategy, contact us here.
