Branding
Branding is immensely important in building, sustaining and growing a business, so having to share the spotlight with another firm is not ideal. When working with a Partner, you will want to be able to put your own personal stamp on any of the products and platforms that you ultimately offer to your client base.
Ideally, you will want access to white-labelled services which are not explicitly tied to the provider but can instead be fully customised and kitted out with whatever branding you feel is appropriate. This will allow you to use your firm’s logo on the sign-up and log-in screens, reinforcing its impact every time that clients visit.
While it may be tempting to opt to work with a cloud reseller that operates internationally and can thus offer the cheapest possible prices for things like backup and storage solutions, this can lead to issues. Legal and regulatory restrictions may prevent clients in your industry from storing data overseas, so the location of the facilities which a partner operates should be relevant in the decision-making process.
Look out for partners that are not only based domestically but also operate all of their hardware on home turf rather than choosing to outsource this to facilities on foreign soil. This will help to avoid any complications further down the line, since the location of data is relevant in industries such as health care and finance.
Coaxing clients into committing to the services can be taxing, especially if they are required to make any kind of upfront payment or sign up to a fixed contract. This makes it important to choose partners that allow you to provide free trials to clients with no obligations attached.
This approach is effective in the enterprise and consumer markets alike, giving people 30 days to experiment with a service from a cloud reseller in the UK before they decide whether or not it is a good fit for their needs.
The best IT reseller will be able to offer you an unlimited number of trials which can be passed on to clients, allowing as many as possible to sign up from your current and prospective stable of customers. This is not only a good way of attracting new clients but also of retaining existing ones and preventing them from switching to rival services.
The cloud is such an appealing prospect for businesses because, unlike traditional IT, it is not something which requires upfront investment. Instead, it is possible to work with partners and gain access to the data centre resources that they offer immediately, with no initial outlay for hardware, premises or staff to worry about.
If steep upfront costs are off the table, then the partner in question will represent a good prospect for any business. But it is also important to look at the prices of the services and packages that are available so that it is simple to calculate the value that is achievable via adoption.
By working with a partner and endowing their services with your company’s branding, you will be putting a lot of trust in a third party, since they are effectively representing you directly, and if outages occur or errors arise, it will be your reputation that bears the brunt of the repercussions.
Make sure that a partner not only operates UK data centres but that they also have services which are properly secured both physically and digitally, along with the ability to provide continuity by replicating information across multiple servers so that hardware failures do not lead to data loss.
While it may not always be a priority during the procurement process, the availability of support services will become important as soon as you start using a cloud partner’s solutions. Check the types of support on offer, whether online or over the phone, and also look for packages that allow support for clients to be outsourced.
By carefully considering and assessing your needs, it should be possible to use these factors to find the best possible cloud partner for your business.