You are the Chief Information Office (CIO) of Shopee [1], a Singapore-based e-commerce platform. Launched in 2015, Shopee now has operations in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Taiwan, Indonesia, Vietnam, the Philippines, Brazil, and Mexico. The company has more than 20,000 associates across all these locations [2]. You are looking to move all of your enterprise computing infrastructure to the cloud (including desktop-as-a-service/VDI for all associates). You are now at the point where you have to make a recommendation on a cloud vendor. This is going to be one of the most important decisions in your migration to the cloud. Your analysis of the four cloud vendors that you are considering is detailed in the "Cloud Wars Go Global: How Amazon, Microsoft, Google and Alibaba Compete in Web Services" HBS case study.

Requirements - Initial Post: Your first initial post should focus on the 2 areas below. Highlight the areas with headings and place them on separate paragraphs.

1. Key Decision Criteria: List 5 criteria in priority order that you will use to evaluate the cloud vendors. Then discuss each criteria in a separate paragraph.
2. Analysis and Evaluation of Alternatives: Of the four cloud vendors which one is your recommended choice? -- Treat the cloud vendors as alternatives, that is, you cannot use more than 1 cloud vendor at the same time. In the case analyses that we are doing alternatives are mutually exclusive options, we define an alternative as "a proposition or situation offering a choice between two or more things only one of which may be chosen." Merriam-Webseter. For example, Let's say on Sunday between 2pm and 4pm I have to decide how to use this time period. I come up with 3 alternative activities: (i) Go to the movie theater and watch a 2 hour movie, (ii) Go to the golf course and play 18 rounds for a couple of hours, or (iii) Stay home and read a couple of chapters of the GP text, which will take me about 2 hours [I'm a slow reader!]. I can only pick one activity, I cannot do more than one activity at the same time during this 2 hour window, so these activities are alternatives to the problem of what to do with the 2 hour window on my Sunday afternoon. -- What decision model did you use to pick this one out of the four alternatives? (Provide a completed decision model so that everyone can clearly see how you arrived at your recommendation).