Algonquin Peak, Adirondacks, New York, Sep 2013

There are many players in the industry today offering Cloud – Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud are the major players by far. IBM, Oracle, HP and others are still playing catch up. Then there are some players who provide a mix of both (their own Cloud services and then a smattering of others)

A careful evaluation needs to be done before the right cloud is chosen. As each of the cloud companies are ‘growing up’ they have started showing some very specific characters and traits. Startups are more likely to choose AWS as it provides a perfect ‘lego-like’ DIY options when compared to other services. Microsoft is moving very aggressively on the enterprises as it already has hooks through its widely used products like Office, Outlook and Active Directory. Microsoft provides more ‘packaged’ options than AWS. Google has limited its focus on Big Data.

1. Capabilities: What are the various capabilities that are offered by the company? Can it be consumed per need basis? What are the additional features?
2. Pricing: Even though the pricing of all the cloud providers are granular and defined per block (of time, or data, or transactions), the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) might turn out to be very different based on the application needs. It is important to evaluate and understand the application functionalities and requirements to optimize the cost. Also, Microsoft provides some additional discounts and benefits based on negotiations while AWS might stick to pre-defined discounts.
3. Long Term Strategy: The long term strategy needs to be evaluated before the applications are moved to any of the companies. Some companies might make it very easy to move to their platform, but make it impossible to move away in the future.
4. Locations: If there are global companies, then they need to evaluate their needs as per the company capabilities

Circle back: /Cloud