The important feature of the cloud

The important feature of the cloud is its team.

It’s easy to verify the technological criteria when you choose a cloud. Reliable power supply, hardware and virtualization platforms, the service portfolio, performance, availability etc. It’s easy for a cloud provider too, to sell with the attractive price per service.

The real Total Cost of Ownership is a bit more complicated parameter to catch. Though well doable by asking right questions. Often deep technical questions to understand where you will pay in excess for reasonable fault-tolerance, performance, agility etc.

Then the most difficult criteria to evaluate. You create dependency of your success on the cloud provider team. More you delegate to the provider, more you depend on them. One story is to rent bar metal capacity or just datacenter premises. Another story is to trust them to deliver IaaS and further PaaS, SaaS, BPaaS. Will the selected provider be overwhelmed by rush for the momentary margin, number of contracts and rush for deadlines of its service roadmaps? Or will they strive to create effective business solution together with the customer.

When growing its scale provider is challenged to keep operational focus on customer benefit. As well as to keep control of the provider’s complicating delivery. Through the years one may fine tune the technology. But focus on customer benefit requires two rare ingredients. First is People with the relevant mindset. Second is the Company supporting people to fulfil their principles. It’s a difficult task to choose a partner who protects you against problems and not a source of the problem itself.

I strongly believe the scale and technology ambitions of the provider are very good features. We do solutions in hyperscale clouds and it works. Speed of business demand fulfilment, cost saving, technological features, security. But it works only being applied in the professional way and for certain tasks. It’s important to decide when and how to handle cloud native needs, who and how will deploy and maintain, how to put together all the parties, compliancy etc. There is not that big chance to succeed otherwise.

You have that “soft” people thing with any type and scale of the cloud: private, public or whatever hybrid and Multicloud. Let’s see:

• One may say there will be people just “behind” the cloud platform. But even adepts of the self-service will deal with the product of somebody’s daily maintenance and development. These people from “behind” do the very apparent difference.
• Furthermore, there are people “in front” of the cloud. They apply the cloud for the business tasks. The way they apply the cloud is definitive for your success story too.
• “Behind” and “front” people encounter each other’s way of work. Thus we have the result of people’s way to run the cloud.

When selecting the cloud most of us will consider price, reliability and technological potential. These are tangible and obvious “Hard Skills” of the cloud. But how will you treat “Soft skills” of such a technical service of cloud computing?