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Author: Haley Brown

According to a research study conducted with the 451 Alliance, organisations’ reliance on cloud is growing.

Public cloud maturity is on the rise, with 30% of enterprises broadly executing production workloads and applications in the cloud. As businesses become more advanced in their use of cloud, platforms and deployments are becoming increasingly complex, resulting in a greater need for cloud-specific skill sets and specialised expertise to successfully execute cloud strategy within the enterprise.

Cloud-enablement providers offering managed services are key to the successful execution of cloud strategy. Demand has caused an influx of players attempting to capture a piece of this market opportunity.

Here’s what you need to know if you’re looking to invest in a managed service provider (MSP).

Agility, Scalability and Cost Efficiencies

According to the same study on cloud, hosting and managed services, the top considerations for building a business case for IaaS/public cloud investments within the enterprise are:

• Delivering a faster time to market and/or business agility
• Providing resource scalability based on application or workload demand
• Reducing the organisation’s internally owned or managed datacentre footprint

These three overarching operational goals of agility, scalability and cost efficiencies are the key metrics by which success is measured. Each of these objectives presents businesses with their own engineering challenges. That’s where external, specialised expertise comes in.

Assess service providers that clearly communicate how they can deliver on each of these factors.

Targeting Inhibitors to Public Cloud Implementation

The 451 Alliance found that the main inhibitors to cloud adoption are:

• Information security concerns

• Cost control

• Cloud management skills gap

If you’re feeling these pain points, you’re not alone. Make sure to identify MSPs that speak to these top concerns and offer solutions.

Making the Business Case for MSPs

The most important factors supporting the business case for managed services speak to the overall drivers of cloud adoption and the top pain points felt by organisations seeking to implement public cloud. But of course, cost is inevitably a concern.

Increasingly, businesses are looking for outside expertise to overcome the complexity of cloud. Many indicate strong plans to adopt managed services within the next several years. If you need to get buy-in from leadership to invest in managed services, highlight this trend so that your organisation does not lag behind your competitors.

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