Seven-step to selecting a Cloud Service Provider

Business viability of the CSP

i. Pedigree: Brand visibility, entrepreneur track record, management, strategic investors or VCs
ii. Financials: Balance sheet, cash flows, VC funding rounds, equity structure
iii. Commitment level: Capex committed to cloud per-se, R&D or innovation budget
iv. Roadmap: Expansion plans announced publicly and commitment to growth
v. Industry rankings: Assessments from third party analysts like Gartner, Yankee and IDC

Strategic capabilities
i. Manpower: Quality of manpower, average industry experience, qualifications, certifications, attrition rate
ii. Partnerships and tie-ups: Published track record of partnerships (the more the better)
iii. Forums: Forums hosted, steered, sponsored
iv. Patents filed (if any)

Portfolio and pricing
i. Portfolio: Breadth and depth of portfolio offerings, medium to long-term roadmap
ii. Pricing flexibility: Maturity and flexibility of the pricing model and up sell model

Operational excellence, customer experience
i. Portal experience: Portal of a company says a lot about it (how rich, contemporary and up to date?)
ii. Web enablement: Degree of sophistication in web enablement of customer operations
iii. Customer empowerment: Extent of self-care automation of customer and service life cycle management
iv. Real time visibility: Real time reporting, application visibility, topology, dependency maps
v. Notification & escalation process: Means, processes and sophistication
vi. Disaster recovery: Architecture, tools and readiness

Technology architecture, portfolio
i. Choice of platforms: Choice of virtualisation platforms, servers, OS, ISVs
ii. Eco-system: Extent of vendor neutrality, migration, commitment to open source option.
iii. Seamless extensibility: How seamlessly extensible (on-tap available) is the compute, storage and network?

SLAs, contracts
i. Measurements: How transparent is the measurement and reporting? Is it automated?
ii. Enforceability: Contractual terms and obligations to the SLAs

Security, legal aspects
i. Privacy policy: Stated privacy policy and enforceability
ii. Jurisdiction: In which country is the CSP located and covered by what jurisdiction?

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