How Cloud Providers Can Differentiate Themselves
It helps to have some guidance at hand when you are in the market for cloud computing services.
That’s why I’m recommending that you check out a recent article on “Five Competitive Differentiators” for cloud services. The piece covers SaaS, PaaS and IaaS. Actually, the article is written from the vendor point of view, noting: “If you are selling these services, consider this an outline for your next requirements document.”
But I think it will help businesses know what is unique to each cloud computing service and therefore help them make the right buying decision.
First mentioned is ease of operations, and this touches directly on the types of services Monitis offers. The story asks, “For instance, how does a company with hundreds of applications in the cloud strewn across a dozen or more vendors monitor and manage those applications to manageable service levels?”
User interfaces are bound to set some providers apart from their competitors, but it’s the work that goes on behind the scenes, such as APIs, publish and subscribe event streams, transparency and auditability systems, etc., that “will make the most significant differences between providers,” the story says. Even when the industry adopts more standardized processes, providers will still differentiate through extensions, quality of features and custom interfaces.
Next up: configurability. The story says that “…ultimately the complexity of the problems we wish to solve with information technology will dictate the amount of configurability we require from our infrastructure systems–even if they are delivered as a service by a third party.”
IaaS vendors can distinguish themselves with network architecture and data and server storage options, as well as services to enhance infrastructure – like security systems, message queuing, and storage tiering.
Performance, or speed, is another big differentiator. Cloud providers can fine tune processing speed, memory speed, storage access, read and write speeds, latency and bandwidth. And they can do this either through technology acquisition or via plain, old-fashioned superior engineering and operations expertise. So ask your vendor their speed-per-dollar rate!
Improved reliability and security is sorely needed in today’s cloud infrastructure – in light of all the very public outages and down incidences on consumer cloud applications. The author of the story calls it “risk mitigation,” and providers can demonstrate differentiation in both of these categories. For example, features such as redundant distributed data stores, early warning DDoS detection events, auditability API, transaction and EC2 monitoring can increase the transparency of both operations and security. Businesses need to trust that providers have made the cloud safe and dependable.
Lastly, cloud computing providers can stand out in the area of customer service. The author of the story says: “In a tongue-in-cheek post from early 2008, I noted that system administrators should “get good at waiting on hold for customer service representatives.” In reality, there is truth to that, but the providers have a lot of room to craft that experience.”
In my opinion, it’s worth it to ask your provider how you can:
-Collect data when a problem occurs
-Report a problem with a click
-Create a “self-service” case with fields to track the progress you’re making on issue resolution, which can be “mined” by the vendor’s support organization to discover trending bugs, etc.
-Easily search providers’ documentation for work-arounds or solutions
-Get help from a chat session
-Buy premium support for a single incident
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