The rise of the cloud rendered the shift to digital channels. Businesses worldwide continue to prioritize digital transformation, given the advent of competent cloud vendors specializing in managed IT solutions, DevOps, cybersecurity, cloud-native development, and so on. Evolving into a prolific ecosystem, the cloud democratized technology and facilitated the adoption of digital solutions. In addition, a new generation of cloud managed services providers is providing simplicity to businesses for boosting outcomes and transforming seamlessly.
Together, cloud management and security services are estimated to witness end-user spending over US$ 35 billion by 2023-end, according to Gartner, Inc. Cloud managed services are adding value throughout the business life cycle, which remains true in tech ecosystems and for product-led models as well. However, organizations must be careful in their approach to deploying cloud managed services to make the most of them.
Deployment of Cloud Managed Services – Key Considerations
- Having a broad spectrum, cloud managed services don’t fall into the multipurpose category. They vary based on the bespoke needs of an organization. For example, the directive to optimize costs will demand cloud visibility tools. On the other hand, if an organization needs to build resiliency for its cloud environment, it will need automation to remediate risks and prevent downtime.
- Organizations don’t have to migrate their entire infrastructure to the cloud. The cloud strategy must befit mission-critical business objectives, meaning moving only those components to the cloud that befits achieving the contemporary goals. No organization must move its legacy infrastructure en masse to the cloud but go holistically into its transformation journey.
- Nurturing an in-house team of cloud experts is equally important for improving the outcomes of deploying cloud managed services. Doing more with less and bringing technological scalability must be aligned with the in-house expertise.
- Preferring multi-cloud or hybrid cloud environments along with cloud managed services is the way to go for organizations, considering their in-house IT expertise. Cloud managed services amalgamates different environment, reducing operational overhead, building infrastructure resiliency, and facilitating development speed.
How Do Cloud Managed Services Help Boost Business
Irrespective of the size of businesses, large, medium, or small, cloud managed services help create a standard set of regulations to manage the infrastructure. This allows businesses to focus on objectives, eliminating the hassles of data loss, service disruptions, overspending, and downtime. Creating the right cloud strategy that seamlessly drives the digital transformation journey and delivers on said requirements remains sought after by organizations. They look for cloud service providers (CSPs) that deliver capabilities of optimization, improvement, and management of the cloud environment, thereby adding greater value while enabling modernization.
- Cyclic Updates – A constant need of organizations is to keep updating the technology stack periodically to support the network infrastructure continuously. Staying ahead of technology updates, managed service providers (MSPs) help build the scalability and flexibility to adapt and transform through customizations in existing services. MSPs also ensure the integration of emerging tools & technologies into the existing stack, without impeding operations.
- Cost Optimization – To reduce the growing cost overheads in maintaining the networks and infrastructure, cloud managed services are a feasible solution. Organizations pay only for what they use and when they use it, thereby reducing operational and IT expenditures while allowing them to focus the capital on strategic business goals.
- Customized Solutions – Focusing resources more on business growth needs flexible, fit-for-purpose solutions. For example, new services set up with network monitoring and security measures can benefit an organization to achieve larger cost savings. MSPs ensure to centralize controls in a single location to enhance management and efficiency of the infrastructure, thereby simplifying support and customization.
- High Responsiveness – It is imperative to have a quick response to new requirements, challenges, or risks to prevent them from snowballing into a technological disaster. Cloud managed services assure necessary attention to unexpected developments in the infrastructure and address them in the fastest turnaround time. Through continuous monitoring and analytics, MSPs ensure proactive support in mitigating issues.
- Disaster Recovery – To prevent adverse impacts of disasters on daily operations, a disaster recovery strategy is critical, as there is a high risk of losing vital business data. Although maintaining the disaster recovery process is another overhead, it will stave off catastrophic situations and ensure minimal or zero downtime.
- Centralized Network – As they use a central data center to manage all applications and servers, cloud managed services enable easy access to data in the centralized network for remote access users. Further, they store and back up the data on the centralized network, thereby enhancing the infrastructure availability.
- Process Simplification – Agility is the key to hassle-free infrastructure management, and to deliver results, organizations need workforce diversity, operational flexibility, security compliance, and change management. An in-house team can face several complex processes while carrying out infrastructure management duties, which is excessively simplified by an MSP.
- Performance – Round-the-clock monitoring is essential for any environment to prevent security incidents. With dedicated support from an expert team of cloud managed services, organizations can ensure the proper functioning and reliability of their cloud infrastructure, even at peak loads. It enables optimal performance and augments customer experience.
To Sum Up
Cloud managed services are the key to boosting business for organizations of all sizes or with varied complex requirements. The spiraling need for digital transformation among organizations across the globe will continue to spur the adoption of cloud solutions. Cloud managed services can be adopted partially or completely depending on a business’s needs for control and oversight of its cloud environment. Using cloud managed services, businesses can easily protect their data, improve productivity, balance growth with market dynamics, reduce costs, and much more.
