Cloud Service Selection for Startups : Identifying how Swedish startups prioritize when selecting their Cloud services

Sammanfattning: A startup’s ability to make correct decisions regarding their Cloud choices is essential if they intend to stay competitively relevant in their business. Choosing the Cloud solutions that allow for an optimal level of production can give startups that operate in most industries a competitive advantage. However, new startups have a plethora of factors to consider when choosing a Cloud provider, which is the basis of the thesis. The purpose of the study is to explore and gain insight regarding how new startups can make suitable decisions when selecting different Cloud services. The study’s main data collection method is a set of interviews that were conducted with CTOs from some of Sweden’s most promising startup companies. The study thoroughly discusses the three largest Cloud providers (Amazon Web Services, Azure, and Google Cloud Platform), and attempts to reveal how these Cloud services are positioned in the eyes of the customers that use them on a daily basis. A main finding of the study was that the most important factors to consider when selecting a Cloud provider is its compatibility with your company’s IT-environment, the quality and quantity of its services, how well managed it is, if it offers data protection compliances, and ultimately, the prices of the services it offers. Furthermore, information derived from the interviews imply that new startups ought to make their IT-solution as simple as possible in order to reduce the chances of running into integration problems with different Cloud solutions. The author intends for the study to be a guideline for new startups to better understand what factors they ought to prioritize when selecting Cloud providers.