Article Reliability of the cloud: the new way forward for MSPs
By Insight UK / 20 Oct 2021 / Topics: Cloud
By Insight UK / 20 Oct 2021 / Topics: Cloud
Reliable infrastructure is the backbone of modern economy. Where would we be without Google, Amazon, Office365, or Teams? It seems only natural to work and do business online, but in fact, it takes a lot of complex cloud infrastructure to offer a stable, reliable environment that guarantees high performance, scalability and flexibility. Any Managed Service Provider (MSP) will confirm it is a challenge to live up to the skyrocketing demands of their customers.
The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated the transition to the cloud. Cost reduction is no longer the only deciding factor to move to the cloud. Many companies started to develop new online services to keep their business alive or suddenly realized how dependent they are on their IT infrastructure. They want to ensure the continuity of their business processes and are looking to the cloud for help. An excellent opportunity for you as an MSP, but how are you going to facilitate all this?
Your customers rely on you for the best performance, the highest availability, and greatest reliability. For the MSP this requires a lot of investments in servers, cooling systems, electricity, maintenance, etc. Running your own data centre therefore means that margins are under pressure. For an average MSP it is impossible to compete with the data centres of big companies like Amazon, Microsoft, or Google. As they have an economy of scale, they offer their services on a shallow margin while at the same time guaranteeing maximum reliability.
Reliability is the most important asset of every modern data centre: the infrastructure must be absolutely stable and prepared for any possible incident or failure. Since companies worldwide depend on the cloud to do business, any disruption causes severe economic harm. So, downtime should be avoided, or at least be kept at a minimum. If a failure does occur, your systems must be up and running again in no time so that business can continue as usual.
As the demand for cloud infrastructure continues to grow, the rise of hyperscale data centres is unstoppable. It is up to the MSP to bring the reliability of the cloud within reach of their customers. With your knowledge of public and hybrid cloud solutions you can advise them as a trusted advisor on the best cloud strategy for their company. A thorough knowledge of the cloud gives you a compelling competitive edge to stand out in the crowded market and build a solid future-proof managed service business.
As more MSPs enter the market, you will have to find ways to ensure maximum availability and reliability to remain competitive in the coming years. We at Insight have been working with partners like you across Europe for many years, providing valuable time, knowledge and support in many (hybrid) cloud scenarios.
Contact one of our cloud specialists to find out how we can support you in optimizing your cloud costs in line with your business goals, whether you are designing your first workloads in the cloud or work entirely cloud-based.
This article is part of a series of articles based on Microsoft’s WAF (Well-Architected Framework), where you find much more helpful guidance. WAF improves the quality of workloads operating in the cloud by focusing on a set of common architecture principles, including cost optimization, operational excellence, performance efficiency, reliability and security.
As a multi-vendor software licensing, workload and platform specialist, we can guide you through all stages of your strategic cloud journey with a series of workshops, assessments, services and best practices. From the first exploration of cloud or hybrid opportunities and benefits to support and optimization after migration. No matter where you are in your journey, we help you to find new ways forward and accelerate your business.
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