Cloud computing has become foundational infrastructure for businesses of every size. Moving workloads off on-premises hardware and onto a cloud platform can reduce capital expenditure, improve resilience, and let engineering teams focus on building products rather than managing servers. But not all cloud providers deliver on that promise equally. The market is crowded, and choosing the wrong provider can introduce the very risks you were trying to eliminate.
Before signing a contract with any cloud service provider, evaluate them against these five criteria. They apply whether you are considering a hyperscaler, a regional provider, or a managed cloud offering.
1. Scalability
A cloud provider should make it straightforward to scale resources up or down in response to demand — without requiring significant re-architecture or lengthy procurement cycles. Key questions to ask include:
- Horizontal and vertical scaling: Can you add more instances of a service (horizontal) as well as increase the compute power of existing instances (vertical)?
- Auto-scaling policies: Does the platform support rules-based or metric-driven auto-scaling so your infrastructure responds automatically to traffic spikes?
- Global footprint: Does the provider operate data centres in the regions where your customers are located? Proximity reduces latency and can satisfy data-residency requirements.
- Service limits: Understand default quotas and how quickly the provider will raise them on request. Hitting an undisclosed limit during a traffic event is a preventable outage.
Scalability is not only about handling growth. It also means being able to scale down during quiet periods to control costs — a capability that on-premises hardware cannot offer.
2. Reliability and Availability
Every minute of unplanned downtime carries a real cost: lost transactions, degraded customer experience, and engineering time spent on incident response rather than feature work. Evaluate a provider’s reliability posture carefully before committing.
- Published uptime targets: Look for the uptime percentage the provider commits to in their SLA (see point 4) and understand what is and is not included in that calculation.
- Redundancy architecture: Does the provider offer availability zones or regions that let you architect active-active or active-passive failover? Relying on a single data centre is a single point of failure regardless of how reliable that facility claims to be.
- Historical incident record: Review the provider’s public status page history. A pattern of frequent or prolonged incidents is a stronger signal than marketing copy.
- Recovery objectives: Understand the provider’s documented Recovery Time Objective (RTO) and Recovery Point Objective (RPO) for managed services. For critical workloads such as healthcare or financial systems, even a brief outage can have serious downstream consequences.
3. Technical Support
Even a well-architected system on a reliable platform will occasionally require direct assistance from the provider. The quality and accessibility of that support can be the difference between a minor incident and a major outage.
- Support tiers: Most providers offer tiered support plans. Understand what is included at each tier — response-time guarantees, access to senior engineers, and proactive health reviews vary significantly.
- 24/7 availability: Production systems do not observe business hours. Confirm that the support tier you are purchasing provides around-the-clock coverage for severity-one incidents.
- Support channels: Phone, chat, ticket, and community forums all serve different needs. Ensure the channels appropriate for urgent issues are available on your plan.
- Dedicated technical account management: For enterprise workloads, a named technical account manager who understands your architecture can significantly reduce mean time to resolution.
4. Service-Level Agreements (SLAs)
A Service-Level Agreement is a legally binding contract that defines the performance and availability standards the provider must meet, along with the remedies available to you if they fall short. Never rely solely on marketing claims — the SLA is what matters in practice.
- Uptime commitments per service: SLA terms often differ by service. Compute, storage, database, and networking may each carry different uptime guarantees. Verify the SLA for every service in your critical path.
- Exclusions and measurement methodology: Pay close attention to what the provider does not count as downtime. Scheduled maintenance windows, issues caused by customer configuration, and force-majeure clauses can dramatically narrow the scope of the commitment.
- Service credits: Understand what compensation you receive if the provider breaches the SLA. Credits are typically expressed as a percentage of the affected service’s monthly fee. Assess whether that compensation is proportionate to your potential business loss.
- Termination rights: Some SLAs include the right to exit the contract without penalty if the provider repeatedly fails to meet agreed targets. This is a meaningful negotiating point.
5. Security Standards and Compliance
Moving workloads to the cloud does not eliminate your organisation’s security responsibilities — it changes them. Under a shared responsibility model, the provider secures the underlying infrastructure while you remain responsible for what you deploy on top of it. Evaluate the provider’s side of that equation rigorously.
- Certifications and third-party audits: Look for recognised certifications such as ISO 27001, SOC 2 Type II, and relevant industry-specific standards (for example, PCI DSS for payment data, HIPAA attestation for healthcare workloads). These demonstrate that security controls have been independently validated.
- Data encryption: Confirm that the provider encrypts data at rest and in transit by default, and clarify whether you can manage your own encryption keys.
- Identity and access management: A mature provider will offer granular IAM controls, multi-factor authentication, and support for federated identity standards.
- Vulnerability management and patching: Understand the provider’s process for patching managed services and how quickly they respond to disclosed vulnerabilities in the underlying platform.
- Incident response and notification: In the event of a security breach affecting your data, what are the provider’s contractual obligations to notify you, and within what timeframe?
Putting It All Together
No single feature exists in isolation. A provider that offers excellent scalability but poor security controls, or strong SLAs but unresponsive support, will create risk rather than reduce it. Build a weighted evaluation matrix that reflects your organisation’s specific priorities — a healthcare operator will weight reliability and compliance differently from a consumer media startup — and request trial access or proof-of-concept environments before making a long-term commitment.
Taking time to evaluate providers against these criteria up front is far less costly than migrating away from a poor fit after your workloads are embedded in a platform’s proprietary services.