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Over the last few years, cloud technology has felt a swell in demand due to increased awareness of its potential. Businesses move closer to the cloud and pass up bulky, on-site set-ups. But unless you’re a tech-savvy company, you may not be familiar with the nuts and bolts of running a cloud ecosystem. That’s when the experts of managed cloud services come in.
Managed cloud services allow companies to hand over (partially or completely) the responsibility for their cloud resources and operations to cloud managed service providers (MSPs). This way, any company can easily tap into the value of cloud computing without having to become an expert or hire a team of cloud pros.
Today, expertise-free access to cloud computing power is a growing field with an increasing number of businesses flocking to MSPs. In 2021, the cloud managed services market size stood at $86.1 billion. Driven by rapid digitization and tech innovation, it is expected to leap to $139.4 billion by 2026. According to other resources, the market will exceed $282 billion by 2023.
Despite the discrepancy in prediction numbers, one thing is certain, the managed cloud landscape will progress in leaps and bounds in the years to come. Today, we’ll lay out the managed cloud computing benefits and drawbacks by looking at one of the best European cloud providers — OVHcloud.
Next-generation IT managed services for OVHcloud infrastructure
OVHcloud hardly needs an introduction. As the leading cloud provider in Europe, it operates 400,000 servers in 32 data centers across four continents. To simplify the management of this complex infrastructure for the customers, OVHcloud has a wide network of Advanced Partners — certified cloud managed services providers who assist customers in handling cloud challenges by administering various stages of their cloud journey.
In particular, *instinctools as an Advanced OVHcloud Partner, helps users master the cloud technology by:
- automating cloud infrastructure and providing built-in tools and services (e.g. managed Kubernetes services);
- conducting database management and infrastructure, including set-up, backup, scalability, and security within the public cloud;
- providing 24/7 business support, including critical incidents;
- accessing turn-key managed infrastructure solutions among others.
This whole layer of governed cloud functions onboards cloud users, making cloud transformation pain-free and accelerated. However, there are more benefits, which prompt companies to leverage managed services within OVHcloud.
Cost reduction
When talking about the cloud advantages and disadvantages, cost concerns often come up as a controversial point.
There’s a common belief among customers that having in-house IT infrastructure is cheaper than leasing cloud capacity. The thing is that they often come to this conclusion by comparing the monthly fees for IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) against the price of buying the server. What’s the point of moving to the cloud, if the server costs, say, $10,000, and the cloud subscription over a three-year period exceeds that number?
However, what slips through the cracks in this kind of reasoning is that the upfront purchase price of the server does not reflect its total cost of ownership. Even if you already have a data center to store your servers there are still ongoing operating costs to maintain it.
As a rule, problems with uncontrollable growth of cloud costs are caused by lack of expertise in cloud resource management. In order to maximize the benefits of the cloud and not to overpay, it is necessary to turn to a reliable vendor that delivers managed cloud services and helps optimize your budget.
Experienced MSPs provide you with a good grasp of your cloud efficiency by identifying excessive resources or applications. Moreover, they ensure unprecedented scalability of your cloud resources, enabling you to pay only for the capacity you use. That way, you can automatically scale up and down your infrastructure when the network usage, storage, or traffic is above or below the regular threshold.
Round-the-clock support
Continuous support is also among the core cloud computing advantages. The importance of managed services lies in instant guiding and on-demand consulting. MSP support desk is manned 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year with a team of experienced system engineers ready to guide in the shortest time possible. Along with instant response times, users can also expect immediate issue resolution.
Quick turnaround times are also achieved through constant remote assessment, monitoring, and rectification of your cloud infrastructure by the provider. As a result, you can avoid costly downtimes without dispatching an in-house cloud engineer.
Robust and flexible infrastructure
The lack of flexibility is inexcusable for forward-looking businesses who are looking to deliver great and next-gen user experiences, accelerate development cycles and operate in sync with evolving markets. To do that, enterprises require steadfast and adjustable infrastructure that can run any workload in hours with no forklift upgrades.
According to IBM, 70% of users note that managed cloud infrastructure enables them to yield services and applications faster. This means that managed cloud computing enables users to make service changes within minutes, improving uptime and the efficiency of business systems. As-a-service billing, ubiquitous access as well as security compliance also contribute to enhanced flexibility for businesses.
Enhanced change management
When talking about cloud server advantages and disadvantages, cloud change management is certainly on the bright side. Unlike traditional update management, MSPs promote agile-friendly change enablement thanks to higher transparency and accountability of changes made. Managed cloud changes also allow teams to avoid external authorization (which is often excessive), gaining more autonomy and reducing deployment time for regular changes.
Managed in the cloud, even complex updates like performance improvement can flow seamlessly thanks to a rich built-in selection of automation and deployment tools. MSPs also foster visibility across the infrastructure, which means that low- and medium-risk changes can be performed without lengthy and painstaking approval rounds.
Automated updates and patch management
With the cloud environment constantly evolving, keeping your infrastructure up-to-date is among the toughest challenges. Managed service providers, however, eliminate the need to manually update your computing resources. Instead, they suggest timely automated system upgrades to prevent costly downtimes, security breaches, and other mishaps.
Speaking of other cloud computing benefits and drawbacks, MSPs also ensure automatic security patches to keep hackers at bay, fix performance issues, and avert other critical issues. Managed cloud computing lets users automate all phases of patch management – from scanning to reporting, offloading the work of on-prem patch management with no costly local patching servers.
This way, users avoid the complexities tied with manual patch management. Automated patch deployment also boosts the security of on- and off-network devices, minimizes downtime, and increases user productivity.
Cybersecurity support
Managed cloud hosting also helps safeguard sensitive and business-critical data by implementing a holistic cybersecurity system. Visibility of your IT infrastructure coupled with a robust set of in-built cybersecurity risk management features and practices allows MSPs to proactively spot malware attacks, API vulnerabilities, and others. Moreover, advanced security measures such as the latest antivirus software, encryption, and multi-factor authentication are also a traditional part of the MSP security ecosystem.
Disaster recovery-as-a-service
No company can remove all risks linked with possible outages and power failures. Instead, business owners need an effective disaster recovery strategy to restore data and get their computer systems back on track. The sooner your data is restored, the less compromised your business processes will be. Yet, the stats are discouraging — over 50% of small and medium-sized businesses don’t have an incident response plan.
Disaster recovery-as-a-service (DRaaS) enables business owners to secure business continuity by quickly eliminating mobility and portability challenges as well as rapidly recovering data in emergencies. Managed DRaaS is completely accountable for the implementation and management of data protection and recovery with no additional spending on software licenses or hardware.
Automated backup is equally vital to recover your data quickly and without disruption. Sending a database copy to secondary servers further amplifies your cloud security with no additional workload for your tech staff. This way, fully managed cloud backup solutions eliminate the burden of deploying, operating, and maintaining an enterprise backup service every 24 hours with all assets being constantly protected and monitored.
Comprehensive SLA
A Service Level Agreement (SLA) outlines the mutual responsibilities of both providers and users, while also ensuring availability of the system, latency, component reliability, and necessary warranties. SLAs facilitate a transparent bond between providers and users as well as protect your cloud assets and inform you about the associated risks. In the long run, a transparent level of service and anticipated expectations will save both parties money and drive satisfaction for not only the parties directly involved, but more importantly, the end-users.
Every vendor’s SLA is different. Managed cloud service providers tend to make an exhaustive list of specificities that cover all possible aspects of collaboration. The latter may include but is not limited to, data ownership, cloud hardware, and software, customer responsibilities as well as data recovery and backup, among others. This level of transparency sets your cloud journey up for success and addresses salient issues connected with your organization’s security.
Compliance support
Compliance audits send chills up the spines of online retailers, healthcare providers, financial institutions, and other highly regulated industries. Standards in data security, integrity, and privacy can be tedious to score and maintain in cloud deployments. But, according to IBM, businesses that embraced MSPs benefit from the enhanced capability to meet compliance requirements. That’s why 76% of respondents cite compliance reporting among the key benefits of managed cloud services.
A cloud managed service provider can help data-sensitive companies to define and manage their cloud processes in accordance with legislative regulations, including HIPAA, PCI-DSS, and others. Based on specific standards, MSPs put a range of compliance features in place to help business owners avoid costly regulatory fines.
Leveraging the synergy of the right cloud provider and MSP
Due to the pandemic-associated impacts, businesses are now more willing than ever to streamline their operations and build a resilient IT infrastructure. The success of your cloud migration and use depends largely on cooperation with an experienced managed services partner certified by your cloud provider.
Thus, instead of outsourcing emergency response, many companies hand over continuous cloud infrastructure optimization to MSPs. This allows executives to focus on mission-critical tasks while ensuring the safety and cost-efficiency of their cloud assets.
However, not all cloud providers are the same and neither are MSPs. To support your desired business outcome, you need to choose them carefully based on your objectives. Together with one of the best cloud providers in Europe, OVHcloud, *instinctools takes cloud computing services to the next, seamlessly automated level. As an Advanced OVHcloud Partner, we assist our customers in harnessing unrivaled OVHcloud potential and offer a winning price-value ratio, ensuring that you can make the most of managed cloud services.
