Cloud Therapy: Ep 004 – Questions for Public Cloud Providers

In Ep 004, your host, Mike Smith, lists the top questions you should ask yourself before you start shopping service providers for Cloud VMs (aka Public Cloud). This list is the result of hours of research he did, calling tens of providers and asking them what differentiates their services from their competition.

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 See below for a full transcript:

Mike:    So, when you’re tasked with finding a new Cloud VM provider for your company, I know it’s not the most enjoyable process in the world, but I can tell you, it’s a great opportunity to really impress your boss by doing a fantastic job. How do you do that? By bringing a Cloud VM provider to the table that meets very specific company needs, and you show your boss how the big-named provider that they’ve heard of does not fit those needs and this other provider does. Your boss is going to be very impressed. It’s going to look like you really did your homework. It’s going to look a lot better than if you just bring the big-named provider at the table and have your boss ask you a bunch of questions about why you didn’t dig a little further to find other providers who might be a better fit than the big named provider. It’s going to look like you didn’t do a lot of work, you just went to big-named provider, and got your boss a price.

So, I know what you’re thinking though – How is this sales guy going to tell me which cloud providers we should use for our company? Well, I’ll tell you. As some of you may or may not know, in addition to being the host of this podcast, I’m also the owner of AeroComInc.com, which, if you haven’t checked it out, go take a look, it’s a review site for cloud and telecommunications service providers for businesses.

In addition to being a review site, we’re also a broker for all of those services. What that means is that we constantly get asked to do trainings and take a look at marketing material on all these different cloud service providers that we sell. One of the products that they talk about a lot is Cloud VMs – public cloud.

For years we’ve heard how great these providers’ public cloud offerings are. Yet, at the same time, when I looked online at the IT forums out there like Spiceworks, Reddit, Stack Exchange, it seems like all of you IT professionals, the only service providers you guys are talking about when it comes to Cloud VMs are the big names. You know who I’m talking about. There are probably two or three large providers that everybody seems to be using for Cloud VMs. Obviously, that’s sparked a question in my mind. You guys know me, I’m not an IT professional, I’m a sales guy, so I’ve never bought Cloud VMs for my company nor will I ever buy Cloud VMs for my company. I’d hire somebody to do that. So, when it comes to the differences between the big names and the small names, I have no clue.

What do I do to overcome my lack of information in a situation like that? I just go ask a ton of questions – so, that’s what I did. I went to all these cloud service providers that were offering trainings to us and marketing information that we can sell, and I asked them straight up about the elephant in the room. Hey, everybody seems to be using these big-named providers, how do you guys differentiate from them? How are you different? Why should I tell one of these IT professionals that they should go away from the big name that they’re comfortable with and try out a provider like you guys? How do I spark a conversation to even get them on the phone with you?

So, guess what I learned? Wow! There are a ton of reasons why these smaller providers can do a lot better job for a company when it comes to Cloud VMs. They’re not the best fit all the time, sometimes these big-named providers are the best fit, but, holy cow, there are a lot of really important things that you guys need to know these smaller Cloud VM providers can do.

I know that you’re super busy, you don’t have a lot of time to research all these providers, but that’s where I can help. This is my job, I talk to these providers every day, and so that’s what this podcast is about. It’s trying to bring you guys some of that information that I learned so that you don’t have to take the hours upon hours to call these providers and find these things out for yourself. But, point is, there are a lot of really cool stuff out there and a lot of really good reasons why your company could benefit a lot more by using a different Cloud VM provider other than the big names out there. You know what’s even better is, sometimes, it will actually cost you less to get more features and functionality than you would pay if you used the big-named provider, which means more budget money for you guys to spend on other cool stuff that you want your IT department to have.

That’s what this podcast is going to be about. I’m going to give you seven questions that you should ask yourself about your company’s Cloud VM needs prior to shopping Cloud VM service providers. By doing so, you’ll know exactly what you’re shopping for and you will quickly narrow down the top 3 to 5 Cloud VM providers that you should be shopping for your company.

Okay, but quick disclaimer first. There are, obviously, a lot more than seven questions, which is all that I’m going to cover in this podcast for the sake of time. If you want my full list of questions – I think there’s twenty-five or so, give or take a few – I will give that to you for free as a free gift. So, I’ll give you a free softcopy of all the questions you should ask yourself prior to shopping Cloud VM providers that will help you find a better provider faster for your company. All you have to do to get that free softcopy is text the word “CLOUDVM” to the number 44-222. Again, just text the word “CLOUDVM” to the number 44-222 and I will send you a free copy of the full list of questions that you should ask yourself prior to shopping Cloud VM providers.

Alrighty, these are the seven best questions, according to Mike Smith’s research, that IT professionals should be asking themselves about their company needs prior to shopping Cloud VM providers:

#1: Ideally, which people in your office should have access to your cloud environment and what level of access should they have?

This comes because some providers allow all kinds of different user permission levels and visibility levels while some do not, and that’s a big deal. If you’re a big company with a lot of Cloud VM needs in all types of different departments, you’re going to want to make sure that you’re with a provider that has a very customizable user access.

#2: Do you have common VM deployments that happen often and require templates?

If you’re doing the same thing over and over again, why would you ever want to start from scratch? Find a Cloud VM provider that allows you to build custom templates so that you can just, within a couple of clicks, spin up the same Cloud VM that you did before. That is going to save you a ton of time. As we all know, you don’t have any free time, so time is definitely money for you.

#3: Do your Cloud VM server needs fit in to cookie-cutter templates or are they more custom, like, you need some custom builds, you need to be able to mix and match CPU, storage, and memory, things like that?

If that’s the case, some providers lets you build every server custom and some service providers only give you certain templates that you can work from. Obviously, you’re going to want to find providers that lets you build custom servers if you have custom needs. Why is that important? Because every time something doesn’t quite fit into your needs, what do you do? You actually overbuy. You never underbuy for your needs, you always have to overbuy. So, you’re spending too much money as opposed to finding a provider that allows you to do custom builds, you’ll spend exactly the amount of money you’ll need to spend.

#4: do you ever build out some Cloud VMs and then, sometimes, they’re active and sometimes they’re not? Are they inactive, sometimes, for long periods of time?

If so, you want to find a provider that doesn’t charge you for your Cloud VM environment when it’s inactive. Some Cloud VM service providers out there charge you full boat all the time, no matter what while others, actually, only charge you when your servers are active. Yes, that’s true – only when they’re active, which is really cool. Obviously, that’s going to save your company a lot of money and allow you a lot of flexibility to build out a lot of servers and only use them when you need to use them. If that fits you, make sure you’re asking providers that upfront.

#5: Are you able to put your servers in to different groups that would have different access needs or different automation needs? For instance, do you want to automatically power cycle certain servers or every time a server’s storage gets full, automatically upgrade the storage without you having to do it? Things like that.

You have different needs for different groups of service, if that’s the case, find a service provider that could group your server and automate tasks within those groups and also have different user accesses or access rules for those different groups. You can think of it in a million of different ways, but basically, do you have different groups of servers with different needs? If so, find a provider that can group your servers and almost have, like, a different total account per group of servers but without having a separate account. Do you follow me on that one? That’s going to save your IT department a lot of time, and a lot of confusion, and a lot of mistakes.

#6: Do you need to adjust the size or storage properties or do you want to add marketplace apps for each of your VMs on the fly?

After you’ve already built in, you’re a month in, all of a sudden, you want to change something, something big. Does that happen a lot? If so, find a way Cloud VM provider that will allow you to do that so that you don’t have to tear down the entire server, and rebuild it, and start from scratch if you need to change something.

If your needs are changing quite a bit, find a provider that can accommodate that. Obviously, that will save you, again, a ton of time. Your company is paying you X amount of dollars per month to do your job, so if you can save time and get more done in the same amount of time, your boss is going to be happy. If you show them that you’re finding ways to save you time by finding a better provider that won’t make you have to start from scratch all the time and waste a ton of time rebuilding a server, that would make a lot of sense to them.

#7: Are your applications utilizing streaming or CDN?

Some providers are not a good fit if this is the case. Make sure you ask this upfront. Some of the niche providers don’t play well in that arena. Some of the big providers actually do. If that’s a need of yours, make sure you ask that upfront because you don’t want to get two or three quotes in to the process and realize this provider is not a good fit for that application. So, maybe find a whole new Cloud provider or maybe just a cloud provider that caters just for that one application, but definitely something you want to know upfront that will differentiate one provider from another in terms of who’s the best fit.

Okay, so those are the seven questions. I hope you felt like I did that those will really help get you in to a better provider faster. Again, if you want the whole list of questions the twenty-five or so questions that have, I’ll give them to you for free, no big deal. These are the seven best, but the other are pretty good as well. Just text the word “CLOUDVM” to the number 44-222. Again, text the word “CLOUDVM” to the number 44-222, and I will send you a free softcopy of all of the best questions you should ask yourself prior to shopping Cloud VM providers for your company.