Cost unpredictability is one of the main concerns for any organization moving to a cloud provider like Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
Unlike capital investments for on-premises infrastructure, cloud services are elastic in how much they cost. Because of this elasticity—and because internal IT departments are often short on time and resources to manage a cloud environment—more and more enterprises are partnering with a managed services provider (MSP).
Partnering with an MSP doesn’t negate your IT teams, but rather, it allows those teams to focus on other constructive projects that advance your goals and initiatives.
For example, instead of spending hours on system maintenance, your team can work on creating a business intelligence dashboard for your sales teams to develop better targeted marketing campaigns.
Beyond freeing up more time and resources for your staff, utilizing an MSP delivers benefits that help your business thrive. Here are four of them:
1. Cost control
As mentioned above, cloud services are usage-based. Storage in the cloud can be relatively inexpensive but the more you work with the data in that storage, the higher your costs will climb.
MSPs make monitoring your usage easier by right-sizing your resources, implementing cost control tools, and forecasting your cloud usage based on your business goals.
In addition, MSPs help you save resources internally by letting you shift the focus away from capital expenditures to operating expenditures.
Rather than investing in expensive infrastructure, you’re able to leverage the scale and power of cloud providers depending on your needs—a recipe for optimizing costs and creating more agile operations.
2. Governance & security
One of the most common trepidations IT leadership has when exploring cloud computing is security.
While security in the cloud has improved measurably over the years, it is still subject to risks ranging from cybersecurity threats to downtime, and to data loss.
This shouldn’t scare your organization away from the cloud, though. By partnering with an MSP, you are able to leverage experts on the robust—and ever-evolving—security features provided by GCP and other cloud providers.
An MSP can also equip your organization with the transparency needed to oversee your entire cloud computing environment to reduce your risk of exposure.
3. Disaster recovery & business continuity
Nothing can impede operations like downtime or data loss. Companies partnered with an MSP can benefit from swift disaster recovery and minimal downtime.
MSPs will leverage redundancy and resiliency to maintain business continuity, ensuring that, in the event of a disaster, your business keeps running with little to no interruptions.
Here’s an example from our own operations:
Applied Materials, a California-based semiconductor firm, partnered with Redapt for business continuity planning. Together, we planned the setup and delivery of a recovery pilot program with their global teams from the U.S., Israel, Europe, and India.
As a result of this pilot, we developed a business continuity disaster recovery (BCDR) solution that not only provided the company with full backups using best practices but also the solution became the company’s disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) solution globally.
4. Customer service & response times
One of the primary frustrations with any customer service scenario is response times.
Leveraging an MSP automatically puts a wealth of information and knowledge at your fingertips. With a dedicated support team of engineers and IT experts, you can make informed decisions about your cloud IT infrastructure and avoid guesswork.
At Redapt, for example, we provide a myriad of services that can help your employees immediately resolve incidents and answer their questions.
This includes incident monitoring, triage, and root cause analysis as well as our state-of-the-art enterprise alerting platform for notification escalation.
By combining automated intelligence with access to real people, our clients can reap the highest return on investment (ROI) out of their cloud computing environments without needing to figure it out themselves.
To sum up ...
Cloud technology and cloud computing are continually expanding and evolving. The most competitive companies will harness the newest iterations of GCP and other providers to get ahead.
For organizations where IT is not a central focus, an MSP can help advise and continuously modernize your IT environment. That way, you can stay focused on serving your customers without overspending or worrying your organization isn’t running efficiently.
Ready to find the right MSP for your business? Click here to read our full guide and learn how you can successfully unlock innovation and reduce costs by working with a third party to manage your IT needs.
