What to Look for in an AWS Services Provider

There are so many choices of providers when it comes to Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud services that it can be difficult to decipher which is the best fit for your team and business. To help you evaluate an AWS provider for your company’s cloud journey, InterVision has created a list of key areas to reference.

How Long Has the Provider Been Doing AWS?

When it comes to your company’s production workloads and critical data, you don’t want to hand these over to someone without a depth of knowledge. Particularly if your IT team has legacy infrastructure and you’ll be needing a hybrid solution to get everything fully virtualized, look at the provider’s experience with datacenter management. A born-in-the-cloud AWS provider may not have traditional datacenter experience and therefore, may have challenges navigating hybrid solutions for your legacy applications.

What Level of AWS Expertise Does the Provider Have?

Separate from the number of years a provider has been versed in cloud computing, AWS has three levels of accreditation (APN Select, Advanced and Premier tiers) and numerous competencies for their AWS provider partners. To achieve these, a company must prove their capabilities to AWS directly, which is a high bar for many to overcome. For this reason, you should have a good degree of confidence that if a provider has one of these accreditations, you will often be in good hands.

However, simply having an accreditation tier doesn’t necessarily mean the provider is the best fit for your organization. To find the right choice for your business, it might be good to begin with the highest tier of accreditation (Premier) then pick the competency types that best matches to your company’s objectives. For example, if your organization is a university and you are searching for a cloud migration partner, then select from a list of providers that have both competencies in Education and Cloud Migration, then engage in conversations with those partners to learn more about them.

 

Does the AWS Provider Align with Your Business Culture?

One key area is to check that the AWS provider’s business culture aligns with your own. What are their values and why? How do they conduct themselves, especially when a mistake is made? These are all questions to answer after having repeated conversations with them, since this will give an accurate picture and not just a one-off. Gather your IT team together and discuss among yourselves which of the providers you’re evaluating would align best with your staff’s project and daily activities thereafter. Usually engaging with a third party could mean years of a relationship together, so you want to ensure harmony on both sides.

What Are Clients Saying About the Services Provider?

Compared to all other aspects, this is perhaps the most important: what do the provider’s clients have to say? Are most of them happy? How well does the provider align with IT teams? Reviews, testimonials, and case studies can tell a lot about the partner’s capabilities and expertise, as well as the clients’ perceptions of them. Look for reviews on third-party websites especially, such as Gartner Peer Reviews or G2 Crowd, to get unfiltered comments.

The Path to Cloud Depends Upon Trust

Confidence in your AWS provider is crucial to the migration process and operations thereafter. And confidence in a provider is built over time, with alignment to your IT team and company in an understanding of your objectives both now and for the future. InterVision has created the Cloud Migration Lifecycle Assurance (CMLA) program to help establish this trust at the outset of your partnership with us. It includes detailed phases for each step of AWS migration and optimization afterwards, so that your business can rest assured in a successful cloud journey. Learn more about CMLA here.