Do you see your assorted cloud services as, in effect, satellite data centers with mostly the same old operational and management issues?
In fact, your increasingly cloud-centric IT environment is becoming an ever more complex hybrid that needs to be managed in entirely new ways. Unless your organization is large, your best option is to turn to a trusted managed service provider with deep cloud experience.
Any of these five signs tells you it’s time to bring in a managed services provider to help you rationalize your quickly cloudifying IT infrastructure:
1 Cloud is too expensive
Were your cloud services brought in ad hoc without regard to their impact on other IT operations? Do you really know how many ‘shadow IT’ cloud services your organization is using? It all impacts network and application performance, swallows IT support staff time, and puts your security at risk.
An experienced, cloud-oriented managed services provider with appropriate technical skills as well as an understanding of your business needs can help you control your costs while also boosting IT performance.
2 Our cloud environment is too complex
Chances are you’ve combined (or soon will) standardized public cloud services from among the Hyper 3 (Microsoft, Amazon, Google) with other technology capabilities, such as a private cloud (for, say, a must-have legacy system), targeted managed services, and/or on-site data center operations.
These hybrid multi-cloud environments will need some customized integration if you want them to cost-effectively meet your particular business requirements. The right managed services provider can help with that — and help you maintain your cloud infrastructure and security with 24/7 support.
3 We have trouble with cloud migrations
A managed services provider can help you plan your cloud migrations to avoid post-migration hassles and costs — and can help you establish a cloud-native IT infrastructure, deploy automated platforms, and supply key expertise in cloud technologies like microservices, containers, SD-WAN, etc.
4 We’re not secure!
Old-school, perimeter-focused security doesn’t work in a cloudy world and has given way to zero-trust security built on authorization technologies that enable you to trust users based on who they are rather than where they are. A managed services provider can ease your transition.
5 We can’t do DevOps
A cloud-savvy managed services provider can assist your app-building, seamlessly integrating your increasingly cloudy infrastructure and conducting application performance testing in an environment that simulates real-world conditions without compromising your day-to-day IT operations.
In my next post, I’ll describe what distinguishes a cloud-competent managed services provider from the rest of the pack.
