Best Cloud Service Provider for SAAS

Running head: ESSAY
How to choose the best cloud service provider for SaaS
Name of the Student
Name of the University
Author Note

1ESSAY
Introduction
The concept of a cloud service provider needs to be clarified before the essay
proceeds to explain the best cloud service provider. Typically, a cloud service provider is a
third-party company that offers to provide a cloud service platform, or even a cloud service
application, storage device or even an infrastructure, to another. It can be explained simply
with another example. For example, a simple home owner makes the provision for the daily
utilities of gas and electricity connections by taking the services from another organization,
that provides these services (Hazra et al. 2018). The owner has to pay the organization for the
services as much as they consume. Simply putting it this way, the organization that requires a
cloud base infrastructure, platform, storage device or application, may contact these third
parties, using the cloud services in exchange of payment for only the amount of consumption.
The cloud service providers are also found to be engaging into service provisions to the
organizations besides the pay-per-use models, along with a huge range of benefits. These
services have boomed over the past few years gathering immense popularity. However, it
becomes extensively important to find out how an organization can chose the best cloud
service for their organization from a third party.
In this essay, the most important key terms that would be discussed are Cloud Service
Providers and SaaS. Both these terms would be defined in this section. Firstly, as it has been
established as above, a cloud service provider is a third-party organization that provides other
organizations with the services that they require based on cloud applications and other cloud-
based services. On the other hand, the word SaaS stands for “Software as a Service”. It is
mostly a software distribution model where it is required that a third party provides hosts for
the software applications over the cloud to make them available to the customers all over the
internet. There are other variations or classifications of the SaaS, that are IaaS or

2ESSAY
Infrastructure as a Service and PaaS or Platform as a Service. It is closely related to the
application service provider or ASP and on-demand computing software delivery models.
The main aim of the essay revolves around the idea of finding out the best possible
Cloud Service Provider for and SaaS model (Dar 2018). This essay will focus on the primary
evaluation of the step by step way of finding out the best possible way for the evaluating and
finding out the suitable cloud service provider for the SaaS models. On the other hand, the
essay would figure out how an organization would possibly find out the best way by which an
appropriate cloud service provider would be selected.
Discussion
In this section, the essay would follow a structure where the step by step evaluation of
finding out the best possible cloud service provider would be figured out for a SaaS model.
The current form of evaluation techniques would be included in this section so that an
organization with a SaaS model would be able to find out how they can select the best cloud
service provider when in need (Mayuri and Saravanan 2018).
There have been several researches about the different opinions of various authors
that suggest different perspectives for choosing the best cloud service provider out of the
available ones. The more it has been found that the organizations are becoming IT system
oriented, it is even more persistent that with time, they are also becoming externalized
(Marinescu 2017). Such that, it has become extremely important for organizations to figure
out the correct cloud service provider to enable the organization have a critical success factor
on a long-term basis, rather than short term services.
The available cloud service market is extremely vast and this makes it difficult for any
organization in figuring out the best cloud service providers. It is even difficult to figure out
the best amongst the myriad available cloud service providers. Each of them offers so many

3ESSAY
services that the organizations feel vulnerable to choose and find out the best amongst the rest
available in the market. From small scale organizations to industry giants like Microsoft,
Google, Amazon all of them are found to be offering personalized services (Afghah, Özlük
and Ünlüyurt 2018). According to the market surveys, it is essential that before beginning the
process to select the best cloud service from the available ones, an organization tries to
understand the industry specific requirements and the exact requirements for cloud services in
the organization. After an organization has figured out their SaaS model and the exact
requirements of the cloud services they need, there are suggestions about the criteria to select
from that might help the selection of the best cloud service provider for SaaS models.
In advance of figuring out the criteria for the selection of the best cloud service
provider, it is also required that the selection process begins with a checklist of the
organization’s requirement criteria (Ali 2018). Without comparing all the requirements for
the organization, it is suggested that one should follow the checklist one by one and start
comparing the cloud service providers by taking one criterion after another. The basic
requirement of the organization should be to have extreme clarity on the technical
requirements, security enabling, service management procedures and data governance
requirements.
In the latest times, it has been found that the technology has impacted upon the
organizations in such a way that the business organizations are now more focused to easily
scale and streamline the organizational procedures. Therefore, to reduce the costs and
implement the easy streamlining of the organizational procedures, the SaaS procedures are
the most feasible one (Wazir, Khan and Shah 2016). It is not just that but the SaaS models for
an organization is extremely scalable and at the same time is focuses on important things.
There are several downsides to this as well, since it relies on the cloud service provisioning of
a third party, that mostly is an open door to poor customer service. Therefore, it is important

4ESSAY
that the cloud service providers are to be selected appropriately so that all other issues of
lending the hand of a third-party organization does not affect the customer service of the
primary organization. Thus, it must be kept in mind that the most important pillar of cloud
computing models, that is the SaaS models has each and every criterion figured out and the
cloud-based tools hosted by a third-party organization does not affect the on-demand accesses
and other applications and services over the internet.
As per several researches, there are a few options that are checked onto to find out
what might be the ideal criteria to select the appropriate Cloud Service Provider. It is obvious
that the selection would depend on the customized functionality and criterion of an
organization, but few basic steps of selection are necessary for every organization. These can
be listed categorically for and organization to follow step by step:
 Certification and Standardizations: One of the primary requirements of any
SaaS model-based organization that wants to implement the inclusion of a
third-party Cloud Service Provider is to check for the certification and
standardizations that the Cloud Service Provider is complying with. There
might be recognized standards and quality frameworks idealized by the Cloud
Service Provider and in every documentation policy these standardizations
should be mentioned (Baranwal and Vidyarthi 2016). Another of the most
important requirements is to provide the information and validations that these
standardizations and quality frameworks are even being followed at every
instance for the organizational day to day activities. More than that, these
standardizations and quality frameworks must also adhere to the best industry
level standardizations. These standardizations might not affect which of the
Cloud Service Provider are being chosen, but these would inevitably provide
help while shortlisting the probable ones. There are a huge number of

5ESSAY
available standardizations and certifications, but the Cloud Service Providers
with the most structured processes must ideally be selected.
 The Service Roadmap and Technology: The selection of the Cloud Service
Providers must be dependent on the technology use and the selection
procedure must also include this criterion. This is to make sure that the work
technology of the Cloud Service Provider is aligned with the current
technological environment and supports the cloud objectives (Guruprakash,
Vigneshwaran and
 Swaminathan 2018). This would make sure that the technology that is being
used by the Cloud Service Providers are aligning to the cloud architectures,
the standards and the services that would suit the requirements of the
organization one after another. This is to ensure that there would not be much
of re-coding done to support the customization required for the workloads
suitable for the organizational purpose. This is to ensure that all of the
activities that the SaaS models would undergo, all would be supported by the
Cloud Service Provider with their technology alignment. On the other hand,
the roadmap of the Cloud Service Provider is also required to understand their
long-term plans. Switching one Cloud Service Provider after another would
not be a wise decision as there might not be chances to implement such
investment from time after time (Devi, Dhivya and Shanmugalakshmi 2016).
This is why, the service roadmap would provide the SaaS cloud service have
assurance about the long-term support and how they are planning to provide
their services in the long term. The alignment would be easier to find out to
shortlist the Cloud Service Provider.

6ESSAY
 The security and data governance factor: One of the most important aspect
of having the Cloud Service Provider is the selection of these services are
based on the security and data governance factor. The SaaS platform might
already have a data classification scheme which helps in the classification of
the service policies on the data residency. Thus, the organizations with the
SaaS platforms must also be aware of the data privacy regularities that they
use. It is also to be mentioned in the requirement checklist if the SaaS platform
is being planned to have any additional innovative security strategy (Thomas
and Silas 2018). Naturally, the organization should select the appropriate
Cloud Service Provider that has the most defined data security and governance
policy to make sure that the SaaS platform is aligned with them. These control
how the data stored while working in the SaaS platform is managed, processed
and stored. The CIF Code of Practise framework can guide along some
specific help to find out the regulatory that would be necessary for the Cloud
Service Provider for SaaS platforms. If the Cloud Service Providers are found
to be providing the services following the ISO 27000 series data security and
integration standardization, or have any other recognized standardization, the
Cloud Service Provider can be easily shortlisted.
 The service partnerships and service dependencies: It is not just the
technical credibility but the Cloud Service Provider must also comply with
their respective reputation in the market. These can be found y researching
about the vendor relationships of the Cloud Service Providers (Guruprakash,
Vigneshwaran and Swaminathan 2018). They might have multiple vendor
relationships which would be easier to learn and understand how the
reputation of the Cloud Service Provider is prevailing in the market. It can

7ESSAY
even be categorized as a shortlisted on if they are able to support environments
controlling multivendor functionalities or even if they can have a good
example of their market reputation with the existing ones. The selection must
also be based upon the partnerships and the respective relationships that the
organization would have with their cloud service partners.
 Service deliveries, Data policies, legal protections and business terms: A
clear definition of the service and deliveries are required and all the roles and
responsibilities along with the service provisions need to be defined. Along
with that, it is to be found out that the data policies and protections provided
by the Cloud Service Provider is related to the data privacy regulations
(Grgurević and Gregurić 2017). The business terms must include a contractual
and service governance with primary focus onto the insurance policies in cases
of data thefts and other modifications, along with the transparency of the
business related to auditing of operations and compliances. The major service
level agreements must also contain as the legal protections to estimate the
service level objectives, the exclusions and caveats, and the mitigation
strategies.
Other than these primary criteria, there are several other that should be kept in mind
for the SaaS platforms to check for the Cloud Service Providers. These include, the cloud
commercials, the reliability and performances, the disaster recovery strategies, the mitigation
supports, the vendor lock and exit planning, and the business health and company profiles.
Conclusion
Therefore, in conclusion, it can be said that the hard and soft factors that has been
used to assess the Cloud Service Providers for providing support to the SaaS platforms are

8ESSAY
depended upon several factors. Mostly, there should be a long-term approach, rather than a
shorter one, where the testimonials and company or market reports should be relied upon.
The avoidance of the propitiatory technologies clearly would define if the Cloud Service
Provider would be suitable for the organization or not. Several industry standardizations and
other customer feedback would come into use along with the technological alignments and
other important factors. All these would be absolutely necessary to find out if the company
that uses the SaaS platform is suitable for the technological and legal implementations. This
would help the future organizations to figure out which terms should be enlisted within the
checklist before they find out the suitable Cloud Service Provider for their organization and
cloud platform.

9ESSAY
References
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