Page 21 - EngineerIt August 2021

ICT CLOUD

Important considerations when

choosing a cloud provider

By Lee Syse, Cloud Tech lead for VMware SSA

oday we are working extensively in the private cloud space and have created a
solution which we term VMware cloud foundation. In short, this is a modernised,
Tprivate, cloud validated design and interoperable platform that provides
customers with a cloud operating model of consumption and management. It enables
the development and management of applications and topologies concerning compute,
storage and networking through a central management console. The whole idea behind
creating a cloud foundation is that you make a standard that works across multiple
locations like AWS, Azure, Google, Oracle, IBM, and then our cloud verified partner’s data
centre. This is true to our “Any Cloud” messaging, where we believe a ubiquitous platform
must be made available in multiple clouds.

When choosing a cloud provider, it is essential to consider the following. Key considerations Lee Syse
have additional explanations with some other listed considerations below that.
and accessed in multiple countries.
1. Accreditation (cloud verified) Our local partners are sovereign
An accredited or verified cloud partner has to comply with security standards like ISO as they are South African based
and PCI-DSS. We have even created a badge of accreditation for local providers called organisations that own, run and
VMware cloud verified. This accreditation provides the stamp of approval from us that operate their own clouds.
a cloud provider has built its platform using our validated design. The benefit of this to
the customer is that their virtual data centre can scale from very small resources being 5. Ease of transacting (one
provisioned to an extensive environment without being bound to a physical server to stop shop, understands
scale their private cloud. networking, security,
compute)
2. Interoperability with your existing footprint As new technologies and services
Your cloud partner must be able to play well with others to ensure true hybridity with are launched, the transaction and
your on-premise platform. In a nutshell, whether this is for a lift and shift use case or commercial model becomes more
even using the cloud provider’s platform as your primary data centre, you will not need and more complicated for customers
to re-factor workloads when moving them to a cloud provider that enables and offers to keep up with. There are many
interoperability. agreements where our cloud providers
can take on this complexity and
3. Consumption models provide consolidated bills for the
Our partners provide flexible costing models, ranging from paying for usage of a multiple services or components
workload on hourly metering or more commonly, paying for allocated resources. We which make up a private cloud. This
have found great benefit in customers subscribing to resources in a virtual data centre. could also potentially expand to
It solves the complexity of working through the complex per line item metering that consolidating accounts for additional
hyperscalers offer, which tend to confuse customers and are a nightmare to predict and software or solutions that extend
manage the monthly spend. across multi-cloud use cases.
4. Sovereignty Another thing to consider when selecting
As announced in the recent publication from government around the future legislation for a cloud provider partner is to look at
the cloud, there is an intent to create a South African based national “Data and Cloud” the additional value-add they deliver.
policy. Digital data is growing exponentially, driven by company digitisation initiatives that Think managed or professional services,
link to the fourth industrial revolution and the growing number of devices on the edge. innovation, agility, flexibility and local
The data and cloud policy, much like GDPR in Europe, will seek to protect personal support; lastly, look at what they are good at
and sensitive data. As per the US cloud act, “US law enforcement authorities may on a vertical scale. They may be specialists
request personal data from US-based technology companies when there is suspicion in finance, mining or the public sector - if
of a crime by issuing warrants or court orders, regardless of the data’s location”. Even they are, you also know they have the data
though some public clouds are resident in South Africa, it doesn’t necessarily mean that governance and regulatory aspects of being
they are sovereign, and customer account information and metadata may be stored in the cloud all wrapped up. n

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