With the race between companies to reshape their businesses and explore new revenue streams, the role of cloud computing in this transformation is greater than ever before. The cloud has become a crucial technology enabler and the emphasis has inclined toward realizing an optimized cloud-enabled operating model. Lack of economies of expertise and economies of scale in the lower enterprise segment has fueled the need for managed service providers (MSPs).
MSPs need consistent efforts to grow above the fuss and not only in positioning and branding but also in manifesting essential delivery capabilities and customer experience. There are 3 major dimensions of the delivery credentials, namely, innovate, enable, and optimize.
Enable
Enable is all about rendering the right experience and expertise to help enterprises in defining their cloud operating model with phased plans to realize desired outcomes. There is a dire requirement for a throughput shift in capabilities for enterprise IT organizations, which encompass modern software architectures that are optimized for improved agility in governance & internal processes, extensive upskilling of technical skillsets, and the public cloud.
As a whole, these are referred to as a ‘cloud operating model’ – the area where MSPs can aid their customers in reorienting their capabilities. The MSPs can also accelerate the usually stated benefits of the cloud that include efficiency, resiliency, security, and improved agility.
Optimize
Optimize is all about offering robust technical expertise that is governed by a well-orchestrated combination of tools and processes. This further provides support and run-time governance in multi-cloud models. The implication is a consistent & curated set of higher value managed services – compliance, resilience, patching, incident & change management, monitoring, etc. – over a wide variety of infrastructure deployment models – bare metal, private cloud, and public cloud – with sheer focus on security.
Managed service providers also need to manifest oversight and strong governance, along with the emphasis on multi-cloud management. This journey of MSPs warrants constant optimization to deliver rich analytics dedicated to the continuous optimization of security, cost, and performance.
Innovate
The least manifested among the 3 dimensions of MSP delivery credentials is ‘innovate,’ however, this is also the one with the greatest potential for differentiation. Innovate is all about bringing proficient consulting ability and skills to operationalize, everything aimed at coupling technology that has a significant business impact. Data continues to be the lifeblood of modern digital businesses and the data and analytics dimension holds immense potential for MSPs to provide value-added services.
The mass data fragmentation issue is one of the critical challenges cited by CIOs, as it continues to plague their data estate as well as their wish to shift the focus from data collection toward data connection. Tremendous opportunity is imminent for MSPs in the near-term to differentiate through a strong focus on data in both leveraging potentials of hybrid cloud models to ramp up key analytics use cases and normalizing & harnessing the data estate.
Several managed service providers have transformed their value-propositions as modern multi-cloud MSPs by leveraging their expertise to differentiate equally in the enable, optimize, and innovate dimensions. A well-established and robust data practice will help these managed service providers to harness capabilities and aid their clients in modernizing their data estate, establishing centralized data control, and eliminating data silos. This will further result in actionable and valuable insights that matter for clients.