Choosing Your Cloud Partner

Partnership: Critical To A Successful Cloud Strategy

Your cloud partner is in it with you for the long haul. That’s why picking a cloud partner that can address all your current and future requirements is a critical part of your cloud journey. You must ensure that they truly understand your company’s business drivers, your desired outcomes and that they have the wherewithal to support your hybrid IT operations in a sustainable and cost-efficient manner over the longer term

There are important questions that you should ask of any cloud partner:

• How deep is their talent pool, and what is their process and methodology for evaluating our needs and supporting implementation?
• Do they have a multi-dimensional offering that can address all needs of a well-ideated cloud solution, including multi-location data connectivity?
• Are they trying to sell you on a particular approach, or are they genuinely interested in finding the right solution for you?
• Do they offer a holistic approach with a capability to advise on and architect solutions encompassing cloud, connectivity, and security elements?
• What is their track record?
• Who have they successfully supported, and how?
• Are they specialized in a limited set of platforms or options, or are they vendor agnostic?
• Are they able to handle complicated implementations and think steps ahead to pre-emptivelymitigate secondary challenges and risks?
• Will they work well with your internal team?
• What does their network capability and footprint look like?
• What is their culture and ethos?

The Aptum Difference

Aptum has been helping customers store, move, manage, and secure data since 1999. Ever since the Internet has been a true force in business, we’ve been at the table helping customers grow and adopt new platforms – from the explosion of web hosting in the early 2000s through the emergence of cloud, and now into the current expansion of cloud adoption and hyperscale platforms. We have the experience, are continually evolving, and will lead the way for our customers.

From the planning and business case approval stage to the migration and management phase, we support your internal IT teams to build and manage true hybrid solutions. We ensure that your investment choices align with defined business outcomes.

This is not about an off-the-shelf quick-win cloud strategy. Indeed, no real strategy could ever be off the shelf. This is about looking at your business goals from every possible angle to ensure that you have the right mix of solutions for today, and to be able to innovate, adapt and react with confidence as you move into the future.

At the end of the day, you need to have complete faith that your investment is going to pay off. By engaging Aptum early in the process, you can ensure that you are making the right choices as you move forward.

Aptum has a global reach with a local presence to provide our customers with exceptional human support and customer experience. Our goal is for you to feel we have your back — so you can focus on the other priorities that matter most for your business.

Partnership Built For You

Most of our customers choose to work with us because we are able to offer a fully-integrated, centralized support and implementation model. Providing a comprehensive set of services can help you optimize your technology investments and reduce costs and complexity of your operations.

The benefits associated with one main trusted partner usually outweigh the advantages of picking a multi-vendor solution. However, some organizations choose to adopt a multi-vendor strategy to implement cloud solutions, and we are able to work with your additional partners to get the right solution in place. While having to manage multiple vendors, processes, and systems can add operational and management complexity to your IT environment, that may still be what is right for your organization.

At Aptum, some customers also ask us to manage other partners and vendors on their behalf, and we are able to make that part of the solution. At the end of the day, it’s about what works best for your business.

This holistic approach puts us in a strong position to help customers with their digital transformation initiatives.

Connectivity Matters

Cloud and hosting solutions rely on resilient, powerful, high-performance connectivity — making it a critical pillar of a cloud strategy. Poor network connectivity can prevent you from realizing the full benefit of a cloud solution. It can also lead to failure of mission-critical functions. Further, poorly planned network options can lead to significant unexpected extra costs.

Since Aptum offers a range of connectivity options such as network, cloud connect services, MPLS, and SD-WAN, this allows us to help you find the perfect mix for your cloud deployment based on the priority of your applications.

Indeed, the connectivity conversation goes well beyond cloud. It impacts mission-critical functions up and down your entire organization, including fully on-premise components. Knowing that companies often have an ecosystem of IT service providers, Aptum specializes in connecting these ecosystems together efficiently. This ensures that data can move frictionlessly between applications, geographies, and service providers – giving you an added layer of confidence.

Strategic: Fit For Your Business

To ensure that any partner is a good choice for your business, evaluate their track record, service footprint, regulatory alignment, and cultural fit.

TRACK RECORD: Your partner’s ability to stay current on their platforms and cloud infrastructure is key to ensuring the long-term efficiency of your operations. Your cloud partner should be able to demonstrate their expertise along with a technology roadmap that meets your current and future requirements.

CULTURE: Often, a provider who is big enough to deliver and small enough to care is a better choice to drive your migration to the cloud. For instance, a large hyperscale public cloud provider may work well for a company with a large and skilled IT team, while an organization with limited technical resources may prefer to bring in a partner like Aptum to help support their hyperscale cloud environment.

GEOGRAPHY: The location of your provider’s data centers can have a significant impact on the responsiveness of your applications. For latency-sensitive services such as Voice over IP and high-volume data replication applications, this could be critical.

Delivering content efficiently to your customers should be top of mind when picking a provider.

The partner’s service footprint should be within your desired geographical area to comply with any data sovereignty or regulatory requirements that you have.

It Comes Down To Trust

When it comes to migrating workloads to the cloud, needs vary. A rigorous vetting process will ensure that your cloud partner becomes an extension of your digital transformation team and works with you at every step of your cloud journey to ensure its success. At the end of the day, it’s about trust. You can’t afford surprises or unexpected consequences or problems. Too much is riding on it.

Work with a partner who will go deep to understand your needs, and who has the experience and capabilities to protect your investments and ensure business outcomes.