Should You Consider an Alternative Cloud? Relationships Matter

Originally published on October 22, 2020 on Steadfast Blog.

In early 2021, the technology market analyst firm, Canalys reported that the worldwide cloud market grew 35% to $41.8 billion with Amazon Web Services (AWS) owning 32% of the market, followed by Azure at 19%, and Google at 7%. Think about that for a moment. 58% of the cloud marketplace is being hosted by just three cloud providers. Right now it seems that the public cloud space is where one of the largest battles is brewing.

While Amazon’s cloud revenue continues to grow,?their dominance of the hyperscale public cloud space is being threatened. According to Andrew Bartels, VP and Principal Analyst at Forrester, AWS’s marketshare of public cloud has dropped from 68% in 2018 to 56% in 2021, with Azure and Google hot on their heels and expected to consume even more of their market share. Another 7 brand-name providers, that include Alibaba, Rackspace, IBM, and others make up approximately 18% of additional market share. This leaves only around 25% of the market that is supported by alternative cloud providers.??

Sure...it would be easy to dismiss these smaller cloud providers. I mean, they don’t even have a TV spot running during football halftime...how could they be any good??No one cloud service is necessarily a good “fit” for every organization or IT team.?

This article is the first in a series that will explore?some of the outlying factors that business decision makers should consider when choosing the “right” public cloud to fit their unique needs and support their business operations.?

Do You Want or Need a Cloud Partner?

Not everyone prefers to have a relationship with their cloud provider, and that’s okay. If you are fortunate enough to know exactly how to navigate a cloud environment and feel that you won’t need any assistance or support in the event of service issues, then you probably don’t need to worry about this point. There may be some considerations around cost, hosting infrastructure, or other points later in this series that you may be interested in. Otherwise, congratulations...you can skip the rest of this article.

If you are not sure that you would benefit from having a good working relationship with your cloud provider, we encourage you to explore ask yourself the following questions:

Are You Tech Savvy?

• Yes. If you have access to IT expertise or staffing (such as backend, data, or infrastructure engineers), you should be able to navigate the complexity of getting your AWS, Azure or Google Cloud deployed and out into use to support cloud platform needs.?
• No. If you do not have IT skill sets readily available, a move to the cloud can be complex, confusing, and even costly in terms of time and expense to educate or build up your team knowledge base. You can generally employ that expertise from your provider. But it may come at a considerable cost.??

Many alternative cloud providers, like Steadfast, offer a hands-on approach, taking the time to understand your business objectives and challenges before prescribing a whirlwind of technology options. By merely taking the time upfront to discuss these business goals, not just technical specifications, Steadfast can look at optimal approaches that will most efficiently support your unique needs...not just one common off-the-shelf solution.?

This transparency allows you to:

• Be better informed about your options.
• Understand how to use those different options.?
• Realize how those different options may (or will) impact your bottom line.?

These discovery discussions are commonly included as part of initial engagement as it is mutually beneficial for both. The customer gets a personalized cloud that is optimized for the greatest efficiencies, while the provider ensures the solution built offers the greatest durability and performance to minimize on-going maintenance time and costs to operate.?

Technology can be overwhelming. If you are not 100% confident in your ability to set up cloud resources on your own, you should consider finding an alternative cloud provider that is willing and ready to act as an IT team extension of your business.?

Do You Want to be More than a Number?

When alternative cloud providers take a more hands-on approach, this can create mutual benefits for both parties. If the provider can help grow your business success and expand more services, this can mean more hosting revenue opportunities for the provider. It is a symbiotic relationship that resembles a partnership more so than a traditional vendor/customer relationship.

This is not to suggest that the largest cloud “vendors” do not have any relationship with customers. But let’s be honest, these vendors sell cloud more as a commodity to the masses than a personalized cloud service. AWS, by its own admission, claims to have over one million active companies.?

If you prefer a relationship that gives you the confidence and flexibility to easily schedule on-going discussions about scaling solutions, integrating new technologies into your current IT stack, or just have someone to call with general IT questions, you may want to consider an alternative cloud provider.??

How Critical is Support Response?

The relationship you have with your cloud provider can greatly affect the type and quality of?support you receive during troubleshooting events. It is reasonable to expect that all technology will have issues at some point. Cloud service disruptions are happening at an escalating rate.?

This past year AWS experienced a multi-hour outage that, while only taking out 1 of their 23 regions, still grounded many enterprise systems and operations. And while it seems that AWS seems to grab the headlines, this is not unique to AWS. Every cloud provider has, or will, experience some level of service disruption...it’s inevitable. In fact, a 2019 survey done by cloud computing expert, Zeus Kerravala, showed that from the beginning of 2018 to May 2019, Microsoft Azure experienced the highest number of outage hours at 1,934 hours registered, compared to 338 hours on AWS and 361 hours on the Google Cloud Platform.??

For comparison purposes, during this same time period, Steadfast audits show fewer than 10 hours of downtime. This number is an aggregate of small, partial service disruptions. At no point during this period was there a full facility or customer service disruption.?

The question you should ask yourself, is how much patience can you or your business afford in those moments? If hours of downtime makes little or no difference on your productivity or sales, this may not be a concern. If maintaining uptime is critical, you need to closely review service level agreements (SLAs)...if one is even offered.??

• Microsoft Azure technical support is only available to customers who purchase a support plan. While a small “Developer” support plan is around $30 a month, it is only available during business hours. 24/7/365 supports starts at their standard plan for $100 a month, and goes up to $1000 a month for professional plans...and higher for enterprise plans.
• AWS support plans are similar, starting at $29 a month for business hours developer support, going to $100 a month for their “Business” plan that offers 24/7/365 support. Their “Enterprise” support plans?increase to as much as $15,000 a month. Interestingly, AWS support plans also use a complex formula that increases your support expenses based on your monthly AWS charges rather than a flat fee.?

Focusing back on support response times (rather than costs which we will address in a future article), it’s become easy to see how these large brand providers support customers and prioritize issues to resolution. If your business cannot afford these high-priced support plans, it can be crippling if support tickets are not resolved as quickly as possible.??

An alternative cloud provider can make a significant difference. A closer relationship with your cloud provider may help you avoid navigating through support call centers, multi-tiered prioritization systems, and even escalation fees to raise the criticality of your support ticket. The sheer size of larger cloud providers makes it unrealistic for them to offer the same personalization in service that an alternative cloud provider can provide, regardless of the size of your organization.?

To demonstrate this point, a few years ago our team met an individual from one of the world’s largest and best-known burger franchises at a technology show. This individual shared an instance where they had a service interruption with one of the large cloud vendors, and even they could not get the attention of that vendor to help get the issue resolved quickly. The point is that if this $20 Billion a year goliath-of-a-business did not have a relationship to get the assistance they needed, need I say more??

Steadfast has disrupted common expectations from cloud support teams by removing call centers and tiered prioritization on support tickets. Instead, call and email tickets go directly to our 24/7/365 support team that are staffed in the data center so they take action quickly. This allows us to provide a 30-minute response time SLA on all submitted tickets (half the time of most large cloud providers), which are, on average, responded to within 7.4 minutes. And, this support level is all INCLUDED with service agreements at no additional cost.

Relationships Matter

At the end of the day, the relationship that you have with your cloud provider should be a powerful consideration in choosing the right cloud for your business. All of the cloud providers, big and small, provide powerful benefits for running your business. It is really just a matter of your confidence and comfort level to operate your cloud on your own, or if you prefer to have a partner ready to support and assist.

Coming Soon

The cost of your public cloud does not stop at the listed monthly fee. There are many more cost considerations lurking behind the service of large cloud providers that you may not be aware of until it is too late. Our next installment of “Should You Consider an Alternative Cloud?” will look at some of these examples. Stay tuned.?