In addition to leading along the path to value in the cloud, our Trailblazers have a more sophisticated understanding of cloud services providers. We’ve already seen how Trailblazers overwhelmingly use SLAs and internal audits to manage the quality and integrity of their cloud services. But how do they choose a cloud provider in the first place?

How important are the following qualities in a cloud services provider? (Top 2 box scores) Click to enlargeWhereas the rest of our respondents are much more concerned about price, Trailblazers’ priorities reflect their cloud sophistication.

By valuing factors like scalability, SLAs, and pre-sales engineering, Trailblazers are more likely to get the most value from a cloud provider, and make their cloud migration successful.  Next we will look at what Trailblazers see as distinguishing factors between cloud services providers.

Companies that are ahead in migrating to the cloud—Trailblazers, as we call them—are seeing diverse benefits from cloud adoption, including collaboration among business units and partners, improved customer service, and time to market. But how are these companies measuring and managing this success in the cloud?

As you can see, Trailblazers are much more likely to rely on SLAs and internal audits compared to their peers.

How do you manage the quality and integrity of cloud services? (Click to enlarge)Worryingly, a quarter of non-Trailblazers have no formal processes in place for managing cloud integrity. Nearly 60% of our Trailblazers reported having defined metrics in place for measuring KPIs.

Coming up, we’ll take a look at what Trailblazers expect and value from their cloud service vendors.