EDITOR ’ S QUESTION

AHMAD SHAKORA , GROUP VICE PRESIDENT EMERGING

MARKETS , CLOUDERA

Companies are rightly wary about the financial implications of getting governance or data sovereignty wrong .

Many organisations realise that certain tasks are more costly in the cloud than expected , leading to a shift away from a cloud-first approach . Instead , they now prioritise choosing the best environment for specific workloads . Decisions between cloud-native deployment and onpremises hosting should be data-driven .

Do they offer enough flexibility to prove technology decisions in the future ? This is all about understanding if the CSP will enable organisations to grow .

Companies need to know whether it has the instance types required to fit current and future workloads if it will support open source standards , and its product roadmap to ensure it is planned for business-critical innovations , such as Artificial Intelligence , AI or advanced analytics . Planning for tomorrow should always be factored into choosing a CSP .

Do costs vary depending on the workloads companies need to run ? Cost will always be among the most essential factors in any cloud decision . However , buyers must understand that certain clouds run specific workloads more cost-effectively and efficiently than others . So , the conversation needs to get granular about costs for the particular workloads the organisations will need to run .

Once organisations have a thorough understanding of their data needs , it is time to start thinking about which provider to partner with and ask the prospective cloud service providers , CSP the following questions :

Do they charge fees for data egress ? Although CSPs recently abolished egress fees , there remain some elements of vendor lock-in with every cloud ; it just depends to what degree . So it makes sense to understand up front what it will cost to move data out of a CSP ’ s environment in case circumstances change . Portability is becoming increasingly crucial to business agility today .

How resilient and reliable is the service ? If a public cloud goes down , entire businesses could halt . With organisations now relying on the cloud , simply rebooting a server is no longer enough to restore services . That makes reliability and resilience two critical criteria for choosing a CSP .

One provider may be more expensive than a competitor . Still , if it offers greater resiliency and significantly less downtime , it may be a better choice when you consider cloud outages can cost organisations $ 100,000 an hour .

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