As more cloud providers race to meet the fast-growing needs of the IT and developer community, the process of evaluating cloud solutions has become more complex. For organizations looking for public cloud Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS), comparing cloud services and features across a level playing field can be difficult. The practice of “cloud washing” contributes to the confusion, as some providers apply the term “cloud” to offerings that are not truly cloud.
Whether your business is a startup developing cloud-native applications or an enterprise organization looking to adopt cloud while leveraging legacy infrastructure, cloud can offer benefits in terms of performance, scalability and efficiency. Ultimately, making the wrong choice can result in problems with scale, performance, cost control, vendor lock-in and unsuccessful cloud migrations.
So what are the key factors that you should consider when evaluating cloud IaaS offerings? To provide guidance around these pain points, we’ve put together a buyer’s guide and cloud checklist to help you navigate the decision-making process.
Performance matters
A top consideration should be the performance of your cloud solution. Even if you’re not processing, analyzing and storing large amounts of data in real-time, high-performance cloud solutions such as bare metal can offer benefits around cost and efficiency when incorporated into your environment. While high-performance capabilities are required for real-time, data-intensive applications or workloads, such as adtech or online gaming use cases, they can also offer powerful compute, storage and network benefits for other use cases.
Choosing a high-performance cloud can also prepare your infrastructure for the future as your business evolves. Consider your current and future requirements, and choose a cloud solution that can grow along with the changing needs of your business.
