With “cloud” being slapped on just about any service by marketing hype machines, it is important to be clear about the kind of cloud service being sought and the requirements of a specific service. Infrastructure-as-a-Service vendors will be evaluated on:
- Available features
- Affordability
- Usability
- Vendor viability, including geographic presence
- Support
The critical exercise will be to identify those applications and data which can be moved to a public cloud and then selecting a service provider that best meets the needs of IT for that particular workload.