Vendor Management for Cloud

There are lot of activities on cloud like re-hosting, re-architecting, refactoring, choosing the technology stack, ensuring security and others. Cloud vendors are responsible for a large set of these activities on the cloud. So, it is important to devise a framework for choosing the vendor, defining what they can and cannot deliver and whether they are feasible in terms of cost, timelines and SLA requirements for the organization. You also need to know when to decommission any vendor or when to continue. There should be well-defined metrics with each organization for choosing and managing vendors for effective cloud leverage. All the top cloud vendors will promise high automation, experience, working strictly according to SLA, undertaking responsibility if anything goes wrong and so on. But how much these can be trusted is a question. So, you need a proper framework for cloud vendors functioning and selection. 

You need to check the benefits provided by the vendor in terms of  

• Fulfilment of regulatory and compliance requirements in their other projects 

• Timeline of their service 
• Adherence to local service level agreements and master service agreements 
• Required operating models, performance availability, accessibility and others 
• Legal and security framework for protecting sensitive corporate data 

You also need to ensure that you are being provided a clear and detailed report and brief on  

• The vendor activities and benefits 
• Uptime and latency 
• How the vendor is managing conflicting standards like PDR2 and GDP regulation and the unknown risks arising out of them 
• Whether separate cloud environments with local service agreements and local teams would be required 
• Whether the regulatory hindrance is blowing off the financial business case or rendering moving to cloud non-feasible 

• Realistic impact of the target operating models used 

Lookback on the project ROI with the vendor 

Periodic assessments must be made to validate the effectiveness of the cloud project and measure the ROI. Assessments should be made pre-contract and post-contract with the vendor. Specific internal KPIs part from the external KPIs must be used for gauging the effectiveness of the vendor for cloud. 

Cost Assessment 

The cost involved in hardware/software refresh by the provider along with the cost required by the provider in setting servers, OS, migration phases, and others must be used. 

Vendor Readiness 

Vendor Readiness for migrating and implementing cloud for the specific use cases must be assessed and included in the cost assessment. 

Vendor support scope and activities 

Vendor support activities and scope must be clearly defined 

Vendor RFI Pack/Returned –  

On issuance of the RFI pack, the packages for work breakdown and a decent response template must be used. The main element for RFI response is checking whether the vendors are interested, how much they can deliver and how they would deliver and whether there is a high-level costing or not. Good response templates prevent misinterpretation.  

Prioritisation Methodology Approval–   

For enterprise cloud initiatives, the vendors would return to select areas of their choice for completion. The speed, number of migrations and the volume of migration must be agreed upon as it may affect the timeline of the program. Removal of work packages partially or fully can be done based on the RFI response and this move has to be approved by the sponsors 

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