When Affiniti began to evaluate cloud providers and services for its customers, where did you begin?

It started with speaking to our customers and assessing what their needs were. This was not just about answering the "I need help backing stuff up" question or [solving] the simple issue of lowering the cost of IT. We ... looked at it from a real needs perspective: what's going on from a business standpoint. These organizations are having growth in data, so we pinpointed [exactly] where the pain was. [Along with] growth in data, growth in the number of servers, particularly with virtualization, and managing it … is becoming a bigger issue.

We started to look at cloud providers and solutions, [and] we knew our customers are in the public sector, and in many cases have very fixed budgets. They can't tolerate the "swipe your card" concept that a lot of different [cloud] providers offer. You never know what the next month is going to look like as far as the number of servers and licensing needs. So, we were looking for a provider with not only a competitive price point, but we wanted a licensing model for our customers that we could add as many servers as they wanted without worrying that the next month would result in some massive charge or something they hadn't planned for.