Managed Services is not a new business model. Businesses large and small have relied on Managed Services Providers (MSP) for around-the-clock support to manage their IT assets either on-premises or at their MSP’s data centres.
Cloud, however, requires a new method of management. A cloud MSP can help you throughout your journey to the cloud, from strategically fitting the solutions into your existing environment, to continuously improving your usage of cloud solutions.
1. Cloud MSP should provide a high level of proactive technical support
As your infrastructure becomes more complex, potentially involving both on-premises and in the cloud components, your cloud MSP should provide base management services for every aspect of your IT infrastructure, including:
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24x7 monitoring of VMs, CPU utilization, memory usage, storage IOPs, and OS performance
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Application performance monitoring, tracking and reporting on operation and system health
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Proactively acting upon the alerts to prevent any breakdowns or outages
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Backup and point-in-time restore
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Disaster Recovery and managed / auto failover to meet your RTO/RPO requirements
2. Cloud MSP should act as one-stop shop for all your cybersecurity needs to keep your data, workload and users secure
Cloud security is a fundamentally new landscape. While many security principles remain the same as on-premises, the implementation is often very different. Your cloud MSP should help you improve your security posture by:
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Focusing on business continuity and cyber-resiliency to ensure you have the proper measures in place to secure and back up data across distributed networks
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Providing services from basic firewall, anti-virus, to endpoint protection, SIEM, and network traffic analysis
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Continuously monitoring potential attack surfaces and notifying and guiding your in-house IT team through the containment and remediation process
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Giving you committed access to cybersecurity experts round the clock when you have limited in-house resources or lack of experience
3. Cloud MSP should help you reduce the complexity and gain control of your cloud spend
One of the biggest fears of cloud adoption is cost. How do you forecast and budget your cloud spend? A cloud MSP should can help you gain complete financial transparency into your cloud spend by:
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Providing you with a clear and granular visibility into usage by department, project, region, workload or individual user
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Identifying areas of inefficiencies and/or redundancies
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Forecasting cloud spend based on your past cloud consumption and future business requirements
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Billing management designed to provide a simplified view into cloud costs and to remove the complexity of cost management
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Resources optimization by provisioning resources more accurately based on real-time and historical data
In summary, your cloud MSP should be a trusted advisor who has in-depth knowledge of your business objectives and who ultimately takes ownership of the end to end solutions, helping your businesses to thrive.
Blair Technology Solutions is an award-winning Managed Service Provider. From on-permise to hybrid and complete cloud solutions, our proven methodology and expertise will allow you to focus on your current and future business objectives. Book a free cloud assessment with us today!
