When it comes to choosing a cloud vendor, enterprises must consider a variety of different variables in order to ensure that the cloud solution they deploy will best meet the organization’s needs. Among the factors that IT and business leaders must consider when selecting a cloud vendor include the vendor’s virtualization platform, their resource and performance management tools, hybrid cloud capabilities, and data management support, just to name a few.

In a recent report, the Taneja Group evaluated ten of the leading cloud solution vendors, reviewing their products, solutions and overall cloud strategy. Here are seven key takeaways that the Taneja Group recommends to IT and business leaders when evaluating cloud vendors:

1. When evaluating cloud solutions, be sure to check out whether the various offerings perform as advertised. The Taneja Group recommends that buyers participate in hands-on, proof-of-concept engagement activities that test and exercise the offerings’ key advertised capabilities.
2. Focus on vendors who can provide the best of both worlds – enterprise-class security, cross-cloud management and interoperability to bridge on- and off-premise deployments.
3. Before you can deploy a successful enterprise hybrid cloud, organizations should first lay the foundation with an enterprise-class private cloud.
4. Look for cloud solutions that offer virtual security and work with the vendor to ensure that their security framework addresses each layer of the cloud IaaS stack.
5. Cloud environments are dynamic and therefore require management that is equally as agile and flexible. Prioritize solutions that have management tools that are optimized for virtualization and cloud. 
6. Look for vendors that have an ecosystem of compatible cloud providers – this gives you the freedom to move from one off-premise provider to another.
7. Make sure your Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) options are wide open – your PaaS choice should allow you to switch providers or run the platform behind your firewall.

For more on the Taneja Group’s findings and to see how VMware stacked up against other cloud vendors, you can download the full report. Be sure to follow @vCloud and @VMwareSP on Twitter for future updates!