The second part to this series focusses more on larger cloud providers, and why they’d be more appropriate to provide services for your workloads. The previous article dealt with the smaller cloud providers, and the reason I didn’t deal with any medium sized providers is to illustrate the extremes to the provider market.
Larger cloud providers like AWS and Azure have been around for a long time now, and have both vast experience and coverage of the Cloud, how it works, and what it can do. So why should you consider putting your workloads onto a larger provider? Let’s discuss some ideas around this.
Large cloud providers have large budgets, and their R&D and subsequent services implementation are much higher and faster than smaller providers. Their time-to-market for solutions ensures you’re able to take advantage of packaged solutions much easier and faster, and possibly get the jump on competitors. Furthermore, if there is a specific need for cloud-base services like hosted firewall, AV or even something like AI, then the larger cloud providers are definitely at the top of the list.
There would be a common fallacy that support might be less personal, or harder to come by when considering a large cloud provider. Consider this…most have what’s called “follow the sun” support, in that if you ever need to log a call, there is always someone on hand to offer support. Furthermore, should the support window for a specific region be coming to an end, they would be in a position to hand over to the next support location who could continue with your call.
Some offer a level of service delivery, either through a dedicated partner manager or through SLAs, so there would always be a means to escalate your call if required. Speaking of SLAs, the scope of a large cloud provider should mean that SLAs and uptime could be better, with more hands-on engineers able to bring an environment online than a smaller cloud provider. This would translate into less downtime for your environment in the event of service disruption.
If your company is more global in nature, then making use of a global cloud provider would be better due to the geographical reach. Data can be placed closer to users in remote sites or countries, meaning that access to data and services is faster and easier. The management of these remote cloud data and service locations would also be more uniform, allowing the same experience when managing the environment.
Economies of scale…the ability to make use of cheaper infrastructure as more is used. Very true of large cloud providers who are able to offer better pricing and capabilities due to the far larger take-on of customers worldwide. As more customers come on, it allows the cloud provider to potentially drop prices as commodity hardware and software is literally paid off faster. The beauty of cloud is the ability to look at decreasing monthly costs, and this is a good-enough reason to look into a larger cloud provider.