Over the last few years, several companies and developers have chosen to use service resources provided over the Internet, known as cloud services. As we already know, cloud services are delivered by several providers according to the most common fundamental models: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Software as a Service (SaaS), and Unified Communications as a Service (UCaaS).

Without going into the details of each model, customers choose cloud services because they are designed to provide easy, scalable access to applications, resources and services, and at the same time all the stuff related to their hosting and maintenance are fully managed by the services provider. This allows also companies and developers to avoid upfront infrastructure costs and focus instead on the specific business and application to be carried out.

The competition between the service providers in recent years has greatly increased. There are now a myriad of services that address many times the same requirements, and, in the choice of one service rather than another, several factors come into play.

Surely having or not a particular feature is an important conditioning factor, but not the only one. Here I would list the top six characteristics and requirements that a service must have and address in order to be successful, obviously excluding the features that are specific to the particular service and/or model.

User interfaces per persona

It is essential, in order that the service is used in the fastest and simplest manner, that the service is accessible in an intuitive and easy way. Whereby, it becomes very crucial to provide simplified interfaces adapted for each user “profile.” For instance, a simplified user interface to manage simple tasks could be targeted for users that are not familiar with the service domain. Instead, a more advanced user interface that is able to manage all the features of the service could be targeted for users that are very familiar with the service and its internal concepts. Finally, an optimized mobile interface that is able to run some predefined tasks on-demand or to easily analyze the status of the tasks could be targeted for business users, in order to make their job more efficient.

Security and continuous delivery

We know that concerns about security are never unfounded, and they especially increase if we talk about the cloud services for several reasons: new security vulnerabilities, service availability, data that is shared by several clients remotely, a public interface that’s reachable from the Internet, and so on. It is therefore important that the service provider must devote a lot resources to solving and preventing security issues: single point of access, no firewall breach, authorizations, data residency, auditing, true multi-tenancy, Federal Information Processing Standard (FIPS) compliance.

At the same time, organizations need a solution that, from one side, continuously monitors and controls the health status of the environment and, from the other side, promptly evolves to add more protection to the data. For this reason, cloud providers have to assure that both needs are met with environment operations (EnvOps) and continuous delivery (DevOps). EnvOps monitors key performance indicators and assesses security vulnerabilities. DevOps could be considered instead the armed wing of EnvOps, since the main purpose is to rapidly, reliably and continuously deploy and deliver enhancements as well as bug and security fixes in the environments without compromising the 24×7 service.

Finally, it also becomes fundamental for some customers to provide environments and services compliant with the Federal Information Security Management Act (FISMA).

Rapid adoption

The service, to be successful, must allow customers firstly to try it at no charge, and secondly, once a customer decides to buy it, to get value from the first day of use.

To achieve the first goal, service providers must supply guided tours and easy and intuitive “sandbox” environments that give customers firsthand experience of a product’s essence – its features and capabilities – putting them in front of concrete use-case scenarios. It is also a good practice to give the option of using a “trial run” at no charge, where they can use all the features of the service for a limited period as if they had purchased it.

To achieve the second goal – providing value from the first day of use – it becomes imperative to provide customers with a set of ready-to-use artifacts that they can exploit to discover the potential benefits of using the solution, even if they have no special knowledge about the service. In addition, these ready-to-use artifacts can be used by service providers to allow customers to be able to use all the latest features and hence, to increase the use and the exploitation of the service.

High performance

The service provider needs to provide a service that allows its customers to have a high-performance experience like no other. For this reason cloud providers must have an IT that is able to more rapidly adjust underlying resources to meet unpredictable and inconsistent service demand, and to provide scalable access to applications, resources and services. Here again, EnvOps and DevOps play a fundamental role.

Disaster recovery and high-availability

Cloud providers must ensure that websites, applications, network infrastructure, servers and more are functioning 24×7×365. For this reason, both service availability and service continuity must be addressed, providing redundancy of underlying resources so that if one infrastructure resource becomes unavailable, overall service remains available. Even here, EnvOps and DevOps are very important, because on one hand they help in monitoring infrastructure, and on the other hand they allow users to automate any remedial action without compromising the 24×7 service.

Application programming interface (API)

Finally, it becomes indispensable to provide some APIs for any service, typically Representational State Transfer (REST)-based API, through which the interaction between customers and cloud services is facilitated. Through the API, customers can automate some aspects of the service and, more generally, enhance the amount of control of that service.

There are several services on the market that exhibit the characteristics laid down so far. The services that IBM offers on these websites are good examples: SoftLayer (IaaS), Bluemix (PaaS), Marketplace (SaaS).

IBM Workload Automation on Cloud is one of the services offered on IBM Marketplace. Visit the IBM Workload Automation section to learn more about the service and the free trial.

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