If you don’t know by now, the cloud is the future.
As cloud migration continues at a pace and cloud adoption is expected to continue to rise, what exactly are cloud service providers doing to provide a better service to their customers?
For starters, we’re noticing that increased competition is leading to higher storage capacity at lower cost. This is great for customers yet not entirely shocking news to anyone. This happens with just about every technology product or service, ever.
What is on the horizon?
Cloud providers are rich in both resources and expertise, and have the financial backing to enhance the performance and functionality of cloud technologies. The same can certainly be said for the ever-improving security solutions and resilience from these services. Cloud based disaster recovery is gaining traction as companies can restore large ERP databases or critical servers incredibly quickly. We can also expect to experience an overall smarter working experience as cloud technologies adopt AI and machine learning to improve operational efficiency. We’ve recently seen that despite an inherently secure platform, malware packages that infect a virtual machine are now capable of jumping to a host machine to infiltrate a cloud network. Cloud cross-tenant testing should prevent a malware infected customer infrastructure from reaching that of another customers’.
One of the most exciting trends which will continue into 2022 and beyond is improved interoperability between different ecosystems with many cloud vendors making it possible to 'play nicely' with others. This means as you deploy more of your services to the cloud you don’t have to keep them all with the same vendor, massively reducing the risk of a single point of failure and improving your resilience. As a result, we expect to see a big shift from a “cloud first” mindset to a “fit for purpose” one when customers first select their cloud vendor. Instead of a rush just to get onto the cloud, customers can now explore the specific offerings from all reputable vendors and choose the one that suits them best, or even the one that suits a particular service best – knowing they’ll be available across platforms.
Choosing a vendor
When considering a vendor to host a new service or platform of yours, consider these golden rules before making a decision on one of them:
• Do I know what I’m storing?
• What are the risks of using the provider?
• What are the controls in place to protect my data?
Many people will ultimately settle on one of the big three cloud service providers out there, AWS, Azure or Google. While each platform may look and feel different, the big three offer a very similar guaranteed uptime with their storage spread across many different locations. AWS may traditionally be the most well established however they all offer very similar benefits and for the most part, it’s only the interface that changes. As a Microsoft Gold partner, we have a great relationship with the tech giants and tend to steer our customers toward Azure.
Want to know more about how you can choose the right vendor for your cloud services? Read our blog on selecting the right cloud provider to suit your needs.
