Every time your organization brings on a new employee, there are high costs. You have to recruit, go through the interviewing and hiring process, then train and level up any skill gaps.
This is particularly true when it comes to migrating to, and acquiring the expertise to support, a hybrid or multi-cloud environment.
The good news is that working with a managed services provider (MSP) grants you the expertise you need to manage the hybrid and multi-cloud, without the high costs. You gain access to experts in areas from on-prem to cloud migrations, containerization, artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), application monitorization, and infrastructure support.
There’s no need to hire and train all of these people—just use them on a project basis in a faster and more cost-effective way.
Today, we’re diving into what a fractional team is and how MSPs can make your business more efficient.
What a fractional team offers
In short, a fractional team consists of deeply talented individuals and their specialized skills to bring time and cost efficiencies to hybrid and multi-cloud operations.
You’re able to engage these expert technologists during specific parts of the discovery, design, or implementation process for only as long as you need them. Plus, the end-to-end process becomes much faster with these experts performing their dedicated functions every step of the way.
Understanding the roles of an MSP
There are three key roles that make an MSP’s fractional model efficient—and successful—for a hybrid or multi-cloud project.
1. The Technical Account Manager
First is the technical account manager (TAM).
A TAM is your guide through the process, a trusted partner who acts as your advocate as well as your main point of contact. They coordinate the entire fractional team who will be dedicated to your project.
They are also focused on cost governance, project tracking, and ensuring your needs are being met, typically acting as the expert in optimizing your cloud performance and spend.
A TAM’s deep expertise helps you navigate and avoid the high-level pitfalls of the cloud. In our experience, internally investing in this role can be a mistake—fractional TAMs have unmatched cross-functional knowledge across multiple clouds and a variety of implementations. In addition, a single company will likely struggle to keep an in-house TAM busy full-time.
2. MSP operations 
Another key role is MSP operations. This team provides 24/7 monitoring support across all major clouds.
In the ever-changing hybrid and multi-cloud world, these experts are always on top of cutting-edge technology, with the latest professional certifications. They are highly specialized, and typically highly paid, so employing their skills and complex technical support only for times of need leads to significant savings. Maintaining a team of engineers with an equal amount of expertise would be expensive and impractical.
3. The cloud architect
The cloud architect takes your requirements and creates the technical solution to match your business needs. This can be a matter of building the underlying infrastructure or ensuring the right technology for an application or solution is employed.
The luxury of accessing a fractional cloud architect at any time can’t be overemphasized. This is even more valuable when it’s necessary to pull in specialized architects from various practices to address a multitude of needs.
Cloud architects are an expensive resource and are often experts in specific areas of cloud computing, so to gain access to such high-caliber expertise, you’d need to hire several full-time resources.
The efficiency of an MSP
If you look at the investment to hire, train, and maintain a hybrid and multi-cloud team this large on an ongoing basis, an MSP is significantly more cost-effective. And they’re faster. Your custom MSP team gets familiar with the project or environment and efficiently works into the nooks and crannies of each role’s specific responsibilities.
At Redapt, we can complete basic onboarding into your IT service management (ITSM) system and get projects and accounts ready within a week. If you're looking at a larger integration with monitoring and tools, it’s still fast, since we have the flexibility to place more resources on projects—and only when and where they’re needed.
Even large enterprises can benefit, as an MSP can more quickly build out a robust team, and that fractional talent could simply be a kind of staff augmentation.
Back to the TAM: they speed the process as well, helping navigate all of this and ensuring your success through road-mapping support, reporting, governance, advocacy, and resourcing specialized skill sets.
There are a lot of moving parts here, and the TAM is the one person that fully understands the breadth of your environment and project, meaning you don’t have to run around in circles trying to get the right person on a call.
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