If I could get rid of one recent piece of jargon, it would be “the cloud”.  There is no such thing as “the cloud”.  Not to make things too cloudy, but there are many clouds of varying reliability, effectiveness and features (REFs). These three elements, more than any others should drive the choice of Cloud Solution Providers (CSP) and selection of cloud applications and services. 

Unlike when I wrote about the broadband markets, I do not include price as a critical criterion. Competition within cloud computing and hosted services is so intense that price differences are of little concern. However, in analyzing REFs, there are a dizzying array of variables and priorities.

Consider reliability 

It is difficult to find public statistics on some of the well-known or traditional CSPs like IBM, Cisco, Oracle and others. However, AWS, Microsoft and Google reliability performance can be easily found. AWS leads among these three providers in service availability but that lead is shrinking. Microsoft, in particular has made substantial changes in their infrastructure to improve reliability. Moreover, the introduction of Azure caused instability which is common with most new software releases. With the changes and more mature software, Microsoft’s cloud reliability will be much improved this year. 

Interestingly, all three CSPs demonstrated better reliability than the typical on premise solution. Every major CSP offers alternative power sources, multiple network connections, geographical distribution and high availability architectures. Few on premise solutions have the same level of infrastructure reliability. 

Effectiveness 

Effectiveness refers to the actual benefits delivered by the cloud solution. Of course, this varies by application and vertical. There is no simple way to measure the effectiveness of a solution. Most companies look at the selection of a new application by analyzing cost, budgets and the comparison of functionality against known use cases. They seldom continue such exhaustive work post installation by measuring the delivered productivity. McKinsey believes the solution to this is to associate use cases —a method for gathering requirements for application-development projects—with use-case points, an output metric that captures the amount of software functionality delivered. 

Use-case point calculations analyze the number of transactions performed by an application and the number of people that interact with the application in question. This accurately measures software functionality to within 10 to 15 percent.

Finally, we take in features. 

Features represent the use case components or simple to complex actions the software is expected to perform. Understanding features is compulsory for gathering requirements used to determine what solution to select. 

Given that 68% of businesses continue to use Windows products to conduct most of their business operations, it is not surprising that Microsoft leads by a wide margin as delivering the best overall business solution. What is surprising is that Office 365 is not only leading with its Office Suite of products Word, PowerPoint, Excel and Outlook. Office 365 is also receiving accolades for Yammer (private

business social networking), Skype for business (presence, IM, video and conference calling) and collaboration with online access and sharing of documents using the traditional Office Suite.

The selection of specific cloud applications will depend upon the business vertical and the desired business outcome. With hundreds of B2B cloud applications being released every month, choices are prevalent. However, selection should be based upon the collective level of Reliability, Effectiveness and Features (REFs) that best meet the desired business outcomes.