These days, you can buy Cloud services from just about anyone.
Some of these providers do it all themselves, from initial needs assessment through design, integration, customization, and implementation all the way to post-deployment support. Even if they provide capabilities via reselling products and services from others, they have deep technical knowledge of what they’ve provided and can stand by it.
So as a customer, your chain of control is unbroken — when you want help or information about your service, you’ll get what you need.
Others do Cloud in bits and pieces. These Cloud brokers often buy and resell in the time-honored ways of white-labeling. Which is fine — as long as you, the customer, still have an unbroken chain of control.
Sadly, however, this is not always the case. Too often, those who actually deliver the brokered services you’ve bought are several times removed from you. Your Cloud broker, meanwhile, may understand much less than you’d like about what they’ve sold you.
Worse, you may not even know whose services you’ve ended up with. This can create situations in which you get shuffled along from provider to provider, never quite getting the help or the answers you need.
So when you’re moving to the Cloud, ask those chain-of-control questions. A capable, trustworthy Cloud services provider will always be eager to answer them.