It is no secret that modern companies face the need to store tens of terabytes of critical information. Moreover, it is very important to ensure the necessary level of security and confidentiality for corporate data. Creating and maintaining your own infrastructure can be quite expensive and complicated. That is why most small and medium-sized businesses choose an excellent alternative in the form of migration to cloud solutions.
However, the large number of proposals on the modern market significantly complicates the choice. Which provider to choose and how? A lot of things may depend on your decision, so you should definitely consider Azure migration services and other popular providers. There are criteria that can help you make the right choice. In this article, we have compiled a short five-step guide to help you find the perfect cloud service provider!
Step 1. Start by defining your own goals and requirements
First of all, you should think about your company, not about a vendor. Write the success before shortlisting providers. Explain the reason for the move, the priority of the workloads at the start, and the expected improvement in performance. Requirements such as RTO/RPOs, latency, compliance, data residency, budget limits, and must-haves. Determine migration strategies based on workload (e.g., rehost, replatform, or refactor), and record interdependencies to ensure cutovers do not disrupt upstream services.
Turn those into quantifiable acceptance criteria. Create a workload inventory that includes size, criticality, maximum usage, and licensing restrictions. Indicate identity, monitoring, and CI/CD integration points. Identify the ownership of what in the discovery, pilot, cutover, and hypercare. So, determine success measures: per cent cost savings, page-load performance, and support SLAs. A defined requirement basis among the vendors makes them always tell the truth. It also accelerates the estimates and eliminates scope creep.
Step 2. Consider the name and experience of the potential supplier
The more famous the provider, the more reliable it is. Or does it not work that way? In most cases, the name of the service vendor plays a huge role. For example, migrating to Microsoft Azure, you can count on high quality and a guarantee. However, it is not an easy process, and you may need an assistant, such as an N-iX agency, to make the transition smooth and hassle-free. So, here are a few factors to consider:
- Which company delivers the services?
- Is it widely known, or is it a local firm?
- How many years of real experience do they have in this niche?
You should find evidence that your chosen service vendor is reliable and has successful cases in its portfolio. This will guarantee that your cooperation will definitely be successful and mutually beneficial.
Step 3. Check out real reviews on the Internet
Surely, you need to get past slick case studies. It’s a must-have step! Review on G2, Gartner Peer Insights, TrustRadius, and Reddit discussions in which engineers have posted unfiltered reviews. Identify complaint trends, e.g., delayed schedules, deep pocket charges, or inadequate change management. Adjust the reviews with recency and size of companies to fit your situation. So, focus on the response of teams having similar architecture and regulatory requirements.
Authenticate assertions using common artifacts. Compare status page archives, incident postmortems, and uptime histories. Find customer engineering blogs about traps and hacks. Check community forums for the response time of vendor reps to give actionable fixes. Contact reference customers and pose such specific inquiries on migration runbooks, rollback practices, and day-2 operations.
Step 4. Assess scalability opportunities
Scalability is not an easy process. If you plan it, inquire about how the provider plans to expand horizontally, handle bursts, and expand geographically. Capacity planning of reviews, quota of reviews, and lead times for providing. Check stateless service, message queue, and read replica reference architectures. Ensure they can stress-test at estimated peak loads and project cost curves as the load increases. Know how they avoid noisy-neighbor problems and implement SLOs when contested.
Explore probe multi-region and multi-AZ patterns, blue-green and canary strategies, and options between database sharding or partitioning. Confirm observability maturity: metrics, tracing, and autoscaling conditions aligned with business KPIs. Make infrastructure as code standard in order to be repeatable. Inquire how the roadmap facilitates mergers, new product line, or overseas roll-outs related to business scaling strategies. A predictably scaling provider ensures the performance and margins.
Step 5. Understand how secure the solution is
Every migration step should be secured. Establish the certifications of the provider (SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA, PCI DSS) and their alignment with your controls. Default encryption review, key management options, and availability of HSM. Evaluate the important things like:
- Identity models SSO and SAML/OIDC.
- Multi-factor authentication.
- Least-privileged access.
- Network isolation with private endpoints and strict change management.
What else? Request recent pen test reports, incident response books, and the frequency of tabletop exercises. Test the immutability of backups, ransomware recovery, and test recovery protocols. Check logging coverage, retention, and SIEM integrations on real-time detection. Demand breach notification SLAs and analyze any publicly available data breach reports to evaluate the culture of transparency and learning. The appropriate provider is the one who is proven with evidence rather than pledges and who has controls that match your risk profile.
Final words
As you may have already realized, choosing a new cloud service can be more difficult than it initially seems. To ensure the confidentiality and security of your data, it is worth considering various parameters and criteria. For example, take into account the provider’s actual experience and successful cases in the local market. Ideally, a potential company should have more than 50 positive reviews from real customers.
Regardless of whether you choose an Azure migration solution or services from other vendors, you will most likely need third-party assistance. For example, companies such as N-iX help businesses of different sizes and with different goals migrate to the cloud. Working with reliable and well-known specialists will ensure that all your data is successfully and securely transferred to the new system. Therefore, be sure to pay more attention to choosing a service provider and do not settle for the first offer from Google search results. Only a clear approach based on criteria and parameters will do!
