The Cloud Transition - An Opportunity for MSPs? 



The acceptance of cloud has transformed the way businesses plan and perform their operations. The benefits offered by cloud, such as cost savings and mobility, have given these business room to target more and have more flexibility. Even small players and startups prefer cloud to enjoy its advantages over traditional system, which means financial advantages of shifting from a CAPEX to an OPEX model. With this spurt in interest in public cloud, some Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are unable to cope with the new scenarios that have emerged. It is important for them to understand the transformation to the cloud and the market for cloud hosting products and services.

The good news is cloud is more of an opportunity for the MSPs. In fact, MSPs should themselves push their clients to migrate to the cloud and get early understanding and advantages of the cloud transformation. Cloud computing has introduced a whole gamut of services for channel providers to sell, on a subscription basis. The cloud market is undergoing rapid transformation, and MSPs realize this and thus are demanding more from their cloud service provider. In terms of availability, scalability and security, public cloud infrastructure can be rated high. Thus, this proposition is found attractive by MSPs and their clients.

SO HOW IS CLOUD TRANSITION AN OPPORTUNITY FOR THE MSPs?

Beyond Reselling Cloud Services 

Service providers and system integrators are going to be the dominant delivery vehicle for the cloud. Thus, for MSPs, the biggest opportunities lie in reselling Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure as an infrastructure solution, offer customer billing and Reserve Instance (RI) modeling to get a firm customer base.

In addition to reselling these platforms, MSPs can also offer managing and remediation services. This requires making regular optimizations, recommendations, and implementing policy management to get an optimum mix of cost, performance, capacity, and security. Services like automatically identifying and terminating unattached volumes that are being paid for, identifying and stopping or downsizing the underutilized instances, and cost modeling for optimized costing are some of the instances of offerings. Also, there is a huge scope of providing value-added services that were not required in a private data center setting.

Migration Assistance & Full Service Model 
MSPs can help their clients who are migrating from a private data center to the cloud by offering assistance. They can be the trusted partners of their clients during the migration phase; and even after that, they can do all policy management, governance and optimization with service-level management. This would essentially mean going for a full 24/7 service model to let the end customer be totally hands-free.

Technical Expertise for Cloud Transition 
Managing the technical expertise required for cloud transition by small enterprises is not an easy task. Thus, MSPs have a role crafted for this. It is up to them to grab this opportunity. However, getting experts can be a hard task.

Managing Security Risks
2016 has proved to be the year of ransomware with many businesses and enterprises getting attacked. In February, a ransomware attack made Hollywood Presbyterian Medical Center pay $17,000 to regain access to its files. All businesses want to be saved from any such kind of threat. This creates an opportunity for MSPs to offer a variety of security services, such as email security, spam filtering, and firewalls. To overcome a ransomware attack without paying to the hackers, restoring to a recent backup can be a solution. Thus, MSPs can offer backup services as well.

Also bundling of services as value packages and creating recurring revenue can be done with some smart moves. MSPs, like HCL, are making an intentional move to next-generation tools to get ahead of the cloud race and take the challenge of managing complex IT infrastructure.

Other Services
MSPs can bundle, extend, and resell multiple IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-service) offerings, including Active Directory, computing, and disaster recovery. Among these, IT disaster recovery is of extreme interest to businesses of all sizes. Thus, MSPs can leverage the opportunity by providing low-cost cloud storage.

Overall, although some MSPs have a conservative outlook toward cloud adaptation and are worried about their revenues, many MSPs have already fetched good returns due to early re-orientation of their business model and services. In IT services industry, change is rapid and inevitable. Thus, MSPs should always be ready to change and gain.

Automation and its Impact on Managed Services 


Automation in IT infrastructure and services is growing at rapid pace while tools and technology are constantly evolving. IT Process Automation (ITPA) involves automating a number of IT-related tasks with an aim to minimize inefficiencies and maximize productivity. There is always a business situation that needs to be addressed to streamline processes and eliminate unnecessary costs. ITPA mainly helps businesses come out of such situations easily and reduces labor-intensive manual tasks.

Managed service providers (MSPs) are always at the crossroads of technology change and thus have to deal with the automation as a major change. To meet commitments on service levels and ensure profitability, MSPs constantly jostle with time, cost, and accuracy in resolving incidents. In such a scenario, service automation can be great deal for MSPs to manage processes remotely across sites through multiple channels. Also, in a super saturated industry, it is necessary for MSPs to reduce costs and transfer the benefit to their customers. This can be perfectly done by adopting automation.

IT process automation helps MSPs in a number of ways:

 • Maximizes Productivity: Automation of IT processes helps do away with manual tasks, thus saving operations time and increasing productivity.

• Brings More Value to Customers: MSPs can pass the savings earned through automation to their customers, thus offering better service at a lower price. As a result, customers have more value per unit spent.

 • Makes Cloud Transition Easier for Clients: Moving to cloud from traditional setup is a complicated process for many enterprises. ITPA reduces the complexity by a substantial level and helps MSPs make cloud transition smooth for their clients and thus earn their trust.

 • Optimizes Resources: With automation, MSPs are able to serve their clients quicker with fewer people. They are able to manage multiple locations with consistent and equivalent control and support.

 • Facilitates Consistency: ITPA increases output consistency and improves system recovery time. This translates into improved service levels for the provider as there is less downtime.

 • Provides Managed Control: Automating does not take control away from the management, rather gives room for managed control. The management can choose to include human checkpoints for taking decisions at various levels of the workflow. At these checkpoints, the process owners are presented the current information via SMS, email, IM or phone and allowed to take the next step for the process to proceed.

• Helps with Easy Customization: MSPs can choose to use available automation workflows for common IT functions and customize more complicated processes that are specific to their line of business. This helps to be put efforts only on the required and core processes and improve their overall resource utilization and profitability.

With more technological solutions coming up to manage their work more efficiently and cost-effectively, MSPs are accepting changes for better sustainability. Automation, in general, and ITPA, in particular, will be the most suitable ways for MSPs to achieve this goal.