CHOOSING A CLOUD VENDOR

We are witnessing a new era in which many large and small scale organizations are largely adopting cloud computing services to take care of their IT needs. These organizations are reporting significant increase in efficiency of operations and total revenue. Recent surveys show that 83% of all IT healthcare organizations are now using cloud services. The world's leading research firm, Gartner also predicts that total annual spending on cloud computing will increase from $152 billion at year end-2014 to over $282 billion in year 2018. This widespread adoption of cloud computing is due to the immense benefits organizations are deriving from it.
To stay ahead of your competitors by increasing efficiency, increasing security and reducing IT costs, you need to choose the right cloud vendor. There are lots of cloud computing providers and the success of your business could largely depend on which you choose. First, before choosing a cloud computing provider, you must have a basic understanding of the fundamentals of cloud computing.
Wikipedia defines cloud computing as a kind of Internet-based computing that provides shared processing resources and data to computers and other devices on demand. These resources can be easily managed and used from a web interface or an Application Programming Interface (API). Enabling individuals and corporate organizations make use of advanced computing facilities, located in third party data centers.
It is divided into three tiers. A clear understanding of the three tiers would help you choose right.
These includes Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service(PaaS) and Software as a Service(SaaS).

Source : statista.com

IaaS
 Infrastructure as a Service is the most basic level of cloud computing. In this tier, you are provided with computer infrastructures such as network, storage, servers, load balancers, virtual machines, databases machines and other high performance hardware stacks. Basically, just as the name sounds. IaaS provides you with the hardware infrastructure you need on a subscription basis. The software to run on the infrastructure is your choice to determine. However, IaaS providers often give you a number of Operating System options with which you can provision your hardware. This tier of cloud computing gives you total control of your computing facilities. You define everything that works on it and you are not limited by anything. The great advantage of this is that, it helps avoid the great cost involved in setting up and maintaining your own IT infrastructure. Most of the management involved is automated and your resources easily scale up and down according to your demands. This tier of cloud computing requires IT expertise and experience to use, however, it gives you all the benefits of cloud computing with the advantage that you have full control of your rented computing facilities down to the hardware level.
PaaS
Platform as a Service is perhaps the most popular tier of cloud computing. In fact, so many individuals and organizations already use PaaS without ever hearing the term "Cloud Computing". The most popular example of PaaS is web hosting.  When you build and host your website with a webhosting provider, you are making use of PaaS. The concept is very simple, unlike IaaS that provides you the infrastructure only, in PaaS, the infrastructure is managed for you and you are provided with the operating system, software runtimes and database management system to build applications. Fundamentally, PaaS provides you the software stack that you need to run the software controlling your business operations. This is not necessarily a website, but it could be any application logic handling the processing and storage of data related to your businees operations . The software stack typically includes application runtimes, application servers, database and development tools. PaaS provides you the software stack to build and deploy applications, and you can easily configure the stack to suite your needs.
SaaS
Software as a Service is the highest tier of cloud computing, providing applications to the end users on a subscription model. In the traditional software model, users purchase, download and install software on their hardware. However, in the SaaS model, you don't have to download anything, you often access the software via your browser and you pay based on your usage.

SaaS applications offer some great advantages over traditional software. The first is cost. Not every company has the financial capability to buy very expensive software required to run their business. Some software cost thousands of dollars, often beyond the reach of many individuals and organizations. But, thanks to SaaS, you can easily use these software at an affordable cost, paying based on your usage. This greatly reduces the IT costs of an organization. SaaS applications can also be more secured than traditional software, since they are regularly updated without the user having to install anything. Hence, bug fixes and patches can easily be done and delivered to the user immediately. Mobility is a big advantage of SaaS applications. Since they are not tied to your physical hardware, you can access them from any device and from any part of the world.
SaaS can easily cut down your IT costs and simplify team-work within your organization. Unlike IaaS and PaaS, it does not require expertise in computer programming. Fundamentally, it is the only tier of cloud computing that is ready for use immediately. Microsoft Office 365,Salesforce, Slack, Adobe Creative Cloud and Oracle's CRM are typical examples of SaaS.

Amazon under the leadership of Jeff Bezos,  pioneered large scale cloud computing 

With the above in mind, before selecting a vendor for your cloud computing needs, the first thing you need to consider is what tier of cloud computing your organization needs. If your computing needs are nothing more than customer relations management, project management and collaboration, data analysis, video creation and effects, finance and accounting and basic employee record management. It is most likely that SaaS would suit your needs. Before spending your time and resources on developing applications for deployment on a PaaS platform, be very sure that the application you are attempting to develop is not already available as a SaaS application from a reliable vendor. There are many providers of SaaS applications. If you are in need of office tools for your day to day activities including preparing documents, inventory management and project management, Microsoft Office 365 is a highly appealing solution, Google Apps and Zoho Apps are also great alternatives , however when your needs are Customer Relations Management, tracking data about your customers, finance and accounting, Oracle Cloud, Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce are highly appealing solutions. Oracle cloud, Dynamics 365 and Salesforce offers a highly comprehensive suite of applications that simplify customer support, analytics, project planning, employee management etc. Both Microsoft Azure and Oracle cloud also provides Data Analytics and Visualization software.  There are many other providers of SaaS applications. Hence, if SaaS would suite your needs, it would save you more money and time.
Despite the ease of use of SaaS, PaaS is the most adopted tier of cloud computing because the IT requirements of most organizations go far beyond the Office, finance and customer management solutions which most SaaS applications can cater for. Factory automation, corporate portals, e-commerce, database management, management of IoT devices and many other advanced computer operations have to be programmed to serve their specific needs. Besides, often, organizations prefer to have total control over the functionalities of the software that runs their business operations. For basic computer operations within your organization, you should adopt a SaaS solution but you would need a PaaS solution for advanced business operations.
IaaS is the foundation of all cloud services. It provides you the hardware infrastructure that you need to run your business. While PaaS provides you the software stack, IaaS does not provide you a software stack. Hence, you need to install the software stack you need on it. This can be the ideal solution for you if the applications that run your operations are to be programmed and deployed in a software environment that is not often provided in PaaS solutions. Take for instance, If your business logic is programmed in C or C++, it might be extremely hard to find a PaaS solution that would provide you the software stack to run your application. Most PaaS solutions provides the software stack for Java,.NET, Python, PHP, Perl, Ruby and Node.js. Hence, if you business logic is not programmed in any of these, a IaaS solution is the right way to go. You might also have your own software stack which you prefer to use for some reasons. A typical scenario is when you application uses a nosql database solution like Mongo DB, which most PaaS providers do not provide. Hence, Infrastructure as a Service enables you to go beyond the barriers of Platform as a Service.
Fundamentally, the first step in choosing a cloud service provider is to determine which tier of cloud computing is most appropriate for you. Whichever tier is most appropriate for your business, the follow must be considered before choosing a provider.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella is a great Pioneer of The Hyper Scale Intelligent Cloud 

QUALITY OF SERVICE:
Quality of service is one of the two most important factors to consider when choosing a cloud service provider. The other being security. The speed of operations and average performance of the service are key to the success of your innovations. The whole idea of cloud computing is about being able to obtain maximum performance at minimum cost. From the hardware level and network level up to the software stack, your cloud solution provider must provide the highest quality in terms of speed of operations and availability of service. Bear in mind that service failures can be highly detrimental to your business. Slow speed of operations and unavailability of service can cripple your business operations and have a very negative effect on your business as a whole. Hence, you should do lots of research about the experience people have with a cloud service provider before choosing it.
Security: This is the single most important factor to be considered. Hackers are increasingly on the rise, now and then we hear news of highly sophisticated hacks, some of it being state sponsored hacks. To be successful in your business, your operations must be highly secured against these advanced threats. Such security depends on you and the cloud provider you choose. No matter how much you secure your business logic, if your cloud provider is not providing you a secured platform, you are most likely to become a victim of a disastrous cyber attack. Security must be at the top of your mind when choosing a cloud provider. There are many highly secured cloud services within great reputation. Microsoft Azure for instance does not only provide a highly secured platform but also provides tools to enable advanced threat protection through active monitoring and reporting of all the authentication locks in your applications. Amazon also provides a similar security system and Google cloud provides a website vulnerability scanner. Such advanced threat analysis helps you detect and respond to breaches that arise from your own mistakes. Hence, you must verify the level of security that a cloud provider gives before making a choice. A highly secured cloud solution keeps your business secured always,however, an insecured cloud provider could spell the end of your business.
Features: There are so many cloud computing service providers and they all are unique with the feature sets they offer. However, never make the mistake of simply choosing the one with the highest number of features. The first thing you must consider is what features do you need for the solution you intend to deploy to the cloud and what features are you likely to need in the future to keep your business up and running. The answers to these questions would help you identify the right provider for you. The features offered must fully meet all your requirements. For instance, if in your organization, Java is the preferred language for your applications, the service provider you intend to use must offer a full Java software stack. One of the biggest mistakes you can make is to because of some fanciful add-on features, choose a PaaS provider that does not support the language or application framework you are expert in, these would require you to adapt to an entirely different language and framework. As a consequence, you are likely to make mistakes due to inexperience with the new language, and this could very fatal. Fundamentally, your cloud service provider should offer the features that would enable you to use your existing language. If your application depends on some external frameworks, it is important that your provider supports it. Always choose the platform that is highly compatible with your current infrastructure and business logic. These would make it easier to move your on-premise applications to the cloud and to easily integrate on-premise applications in an hybrid cloud scenario. And do consider your future needs and how much your provider can meet those needs.
Support: Moving your on-premise applications to the cloud could be made easier with first class customer support. Also, should you run into any issue, the speed of response of the customer support could help you avoid catastrophic situations. You must do a thorough research about the customer service of each provider before choosing any. To keep your business running smooth, you need a provider that offers a customer support that is always available to respond to your complaints and expert enough to quickly resolve your problems.
Reliability: There are many well established and highly reputable cloud computer providers, many ranking high on the fortune 500 list, however, there are a number of new participants in the cloud computing industry. As starters, many of them offer very attractive features at lower costs and are highly suitable for small and medium scale enterprises, quite a number of them are very good but you must be careful about choosing a provider that is not established for a long term. The danger is, some of these providers may run out of business or shut down their cloud computing services due to various reasons, such an event might affect your business operations badly. A typical example of these was Zimki, a Platform as  a Service with thousands of developer accounts, which was shutdown in December 2007. While it's customers can move to other cloud computing providers, such an event could temporarily affect business operations and lead to costly overhaul of existing applications.
This is not limited to the start-ups, HP launched its Cloud Computing service in April 2012 but faced great challenges getting it to run at the required scale. Hence, after years of battling to stabliize its cloud platform, On October 21,2015, HP announced that it would shutdown the HP public cloud in January, 2016. This prooved that even the big companies could fail in the cloud computing business. Amazon AWS and Microsoft Azure were built under the leadership of Jeff Bezos of Amazon and Satya Nadella of Microsoft, two great visionaries. Both cloud platforms have continued to grow from strength to strength. There are other cloud providers that are quite reliable and very promising. When choosing a cloud provider, do a lot of research and be clear about the direction your cloud provider is heading to and  be sure it can be relied on to provide it's services for many years.
Cost: The most expensive cloud services aren't always the best. As the cloud computing industry is highly competitive, different providers offer different pricing models. Some are offered on a pay per hour used basis while others are based on monthly or yearly usage. The rates you are charged would also depend on the amount of resources you are using. Some cloud services are also charged based on your resource usage alone. It all depends on your needs and how much you can afford. In order to minimize spending, you should compare the pricing of different cloud computing providers. And never pay for what you don't need. Some cloud computing providers could list endless add-on services in order to justify higher pricing, however, be very sure you really need these add-on features before paying. Fundamentally, only pay for the features that you really need.
Terms And Conditions: It is a general practice to simply click on the "I agree" button of a terms of use page, without reading a single line. While you could do that when creating a new social profile, when it comes to choosing a cloud service provider, please, "Do Not". No matter how long it maybe, do read it in full. Should your organization run into a legal tussle in the future, you might find it invaluable. As an enterprise intending to store and process customer data using a cloud computing service, its important for you to know how your provider treats your data. Information pertaining to these is often a major part of the terms of use, hence you must always read it.
Cloud computing has come to stay and experts are predicting that organizations that are reluctant to move to the cloud would soon find themselves a step behind their competitors. Many enterprises are taking advantage of cloud computing to improve the quality of their services, efficiency of operations, greater customer satisfaction, effective management and increase their revenues. To reap these benefits, first you must clearly identify and outline the IT needs and goals of your organization. Then following the factors listed in this article, choose a cloud computing service provider that best fits your needs. Do not always look for the provider that would fit in to all your needs. You can choose different providers for different IT needs. For example, a provider may offer excellent software as a service solutions but another may offer better PaaS solutions. Nothing stops you from using both providers for your SaaS and PaaS needs. Do not unnecessarily depend upon a single provider. The cloud computing world is large.

Amazon and Microsoft are the two top providers of cloud computing services. Google, IBM and Oracle are notable players in the industry and are each working to improve their service offerings. There are many other players and you cannot tell when when an innovative organization would come up with the next big cloud platform, so keep do consider all your options well before choosing any.