Kyle HilgendorfLast week I wrote a short blog on some not-so-common differentiators among public cloud IaaS providers. This week, Gartner published a large corresponding research project that I wanted to highlight.
“Evaluation Criteria for Public Cloud IaaS Providers” (Gartner for Technology Professionals subscription required) is the result of a year worth of customer interactions and personal testing. The research document covers important pieces of criteria by which enterprise customers should evaluate public cloud IaaS providers.
The document has 163 criteria components broken down into eight categories:
- Compute
- Storage
- Network
- Cross Service
- Support & Communication
- Service Levels
- Management
- Price & Billing
Within each category, I assigned one of three category ratings to each criterion:
- Required – Criteria that Gartner considers essential for IaaS providers to be capable of hosting production applications and to be considered “enterprise-grade.” IaaS solutions meeting less than all of the required criteria may still be employed for less-critical workloads or for very specific use cases where there is some work-around for a missing piece.
- Preferred – Criteria that Gartner considers nice to have and which are often those features that separate or differentiate good services from the best services. When evaluating IaaS providers, customers should always ask to see road maps that specify when providers plan to meet missing preferred criteria.
- Optional – Criteria that may be unique to specific use cases, or emerging criteria that will be more important as time progresses.
The research document (68 pages in length) includes a downloadable spreadsheet that allows customers to cut and paste into RFIs/RFPs or to change the weighting themselves for individual business requirements.
I am very proud of this research and many customer discussions went into creating the criteria list. I am confident that it will help many organizations cut down the time it takes to build evaluation criteria and questions for IaaS providers.
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Category: Cloud Evaluation Gartner IaaS Providers Tags: Cloud, Criteria, Evaluation, Iaas, Providers
