Managed cloud services entails outsourcing cloud services to a third party.
Managed service providers (MSPs) are IT experts that can manage infrastructure as well as auxiliary services for companies that lack the level of dedicated IT resources in-house. Partnering with a managed cloud services provider not only helps free up resources and boost operational efficiencies but can catalyze digital transformation efforts.
In this post, we will explore some of the specific ways in which partnering with a managed services provider an improve business operations.
Managed Services Provider for Additional IT Resources
Often times, internal IT departments don’t possess the time, skills or resources needed to monitor and maintain a cloud environment.
Hiring a managed services provider doesn’t mean doing away with your current IT staff. Instead, it allows for your IT staff to focus on other constructive projects that advance the company’s goals and initiatives. With the right balance of maintenance and development, outsourcing cloud services can create room for establishing a true DevOps environment.
For example, instead of spending hours on system maintenance, your IT team can work on creating a business intelligence dashboard for the sales team to create better targeted marketing campaigns.
Cost Control
By outsourcing cloud services, your company can immediately save on maintenance, capital expenditure and operations. For small companies that need to double down on their core products and services as well as growth may not be able to spend the necessary overhead to employ a fully staffed IT team.
A subscription-based billing model makes monthly recurring costs predictable. It allows companies to shift focus away from capital expenditure to operating expenditure. Cloud services allow companies to scale IT operations without investing in expensive hardware and services up front. Employing a cloud managed services provider creates a nimbler operating environment and infrastructure.
At Redapt, we help our clients better manage their costs by mapping costs to business value rightsizing resources and enabling cost control. We also help predict future costs in order to stay away from runaway spend. We tailor cost control dashboards for executives to be able to quickly visualize and monitor cloud computing expenditure.
Security with Managed Services Providers
One of the trepidations IT leadership may have when exploring cloud computing is security. Cloud computing takes your company’s data from on- premise servers to the internet. While cloud computing has improved measurably over the years when it comes to security, it still remains subject to risk. These risks range from cybersecurity threats to downtime to data loss.
Security shouldn’t hinder a company’s decision to move to the cloud. By partnering with a managed services provider with top security certifications, IT leadership can keep peace of mind. At Redapt, our certified Azure experts are ready 24/7 to fix any problem while automated remediation ensures swift resolution.
Effective managed services can also equip your company with the transparency needed to oversee your entire cloud computing environment and reduce risk exposure. Managed services providers that manage services like Azure can take advantage of built-in cybersecurity features. Before moving to the cloud, organizations must do their own due diligence to ensure that data connections and security measures are compliant with industry standards.
Disaster Recovery and Business Continuity
Nothing can impede operations like downtime or a data loss.
By partnering with a cloud managed services provider, companies can benefit from swift disaster recovery and minimal downtime. Services are the lifeblood of the managed services provider and disaster recovery and business continuity planning is often listed in the services agreement.
Managed services providers will leverage redundancy and resiliency to maintain business continuity. This ensures that in the event of a disaster, your business keeps running with little to no interruptions.
Applied Materials, a California-based semiconductor firm, partnered with Redapt for business continuity planning. Together, we planned the setup and delivery of an Azure Site Recovery pilot program with their global team from US, Israel, Europe and India. This Business Continuity Disaster Recovery (BCDR) solution then became their Corporate IT-based DRaaS solution globally.
At Redapt, we incorporate business continuity planning with our managed services as well as modern datacenter offerings.
Customer Service and Response Times with Managed Services
One of the primary frustrations with any customer service scenario is response times. Leveraging a managed services provider 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 avoiding guesswork and basic research.
At Redapt, we provide a myriad of services that can help your employees immediately resolve incidents and answer 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 ROI out of their cloud computing environments without needing to figure it out themselves.
Cloud technology and cloud computing are continually expanding and evolving. The most competitive companies will harness the newest iterations of cloud computing technology to get ahead. For organizations where IT is not a central focus, a managed service provider can help advise and continuously modernize your IT environment to ensure you are achieving the highest levels of operational efficiency.
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.
