Today’s businesses are under intense pressure-how to drive innovation and accelerate past competition. As a result, companies are scrambling, working on their latest IT strategies. Many of these companies are turning to cloud computing to realize cost efficiencies and gain the level of flexibility that is needed in today’s fast-evolving environment.

Cloud computing allows companies to create growth-sustaining business processes and provides a much faster and better way to deliver technology capabilities, reducing capital expenses associated with the procurement and maintenance of IT resources.

Cloud computing is a disruptive phenomenon, it’s increasingly becoming the “game rule” for today’s modern business processing, and it’s clearly one technology area that you can’t afford to ignore and miss. Cloud computing offers tons of business benefits and has the potential to change everything- to make businesses more agile, more responsive, and much faster than ever.

So why make the journey to the cloud? Moving to the cloud is bringing businesses of all sizes significant cost savings as well as unexpected productivity benefits- enabling employees to get more done, work faster, and gain a competitive edge, free IT, and staff, from on-premise software and server management. But like any IT project, failing to choose the right one could lead to serious trouble and disaster. In order to reap the benefits promised by cloud computing, companies must develop and employ a methodology to identify and select the right cloud provider.

The cloud decision may be easy and quick but the journey to the cloud poses serious challenges. Before cloud migration starts, cloud options need to be researched and the project plan must be implemented, it’s really a daunting task for a company. If a company does not manage its journey to the cloud deliberately and effectively by selecting the lowest-risk cloud provider, it could be placing its data at great risk.

There are plenty of cloud service providers to choose from- Amazon, Google, Microsoft, Rackspace, and Salesforce but selecting the right one to trust with your IT assets can be as tricky as predicting weather or storm. The cloud is a vast IT field with some different facets and before you can make a good decision regarding the best provider for your company, it’s very important to know how cloud computing works and the different deployment models that are available in the market.

The service provider you choose will play a key role in supporting your IT and business objectives, to determine whether they’re up to the task you need to do something very important. The following tips will help you in choosing the right service provider. Let’s make it short and direct to the point.

  1. First, you need to determine your company’s needs; you can start this by doing some workload analysis.
  2. Select a cloud service provider/vendor, like Microsoft Azure, with deep knowledge of the service you are buying.
  3. Select a cloud service provider/vendor with proven experience and a track record of success.
  4. Select a cloud service provider/vendor, such as Amazon AWS, with a cloud infrastructure that surpasses your requirements or has the capacity to scale with your business.
  5. Must have a comprehensive knowledge of IT and migration cost.
  6. The service provider must offer a range of managed and professional services in order to support your company as it grows and evolves.
  7. Select a cloud service provider/vendor that has a strong relationship with a number of best-in-breed technology providers (VMware, Cisco, Oracle, IBM and etc.).
  8. Select a service provider whose technology is compatible with your applications and that will work seamlessly into your existing IT framework.
  9. Select a service provider with well-defined process control procedures in place.
  10. And last, always select a service provider that sells on IT value, not cost.