There is a burning question in the minds of most CIOs and IT Leaders today. Why does one even need a Managed Services Provider for Public Cloud?
It’s not just one question now, there are follow up questions as well. Why can one not manage their own Public Cloud? Why must they not directly deal with AWS & Azure and manage it all by themselves?
The short answer is simple, really. Yes – you can.
The long answer? Not so much. To do it all, you have to continually invest in IT personnel, ensure they keep upgrading their skills, get required certifications, gain expertise in the right tools to ensure that your IT is running on a secure, safe and effective Cloud Environment, without incurring costs for resources you might not even need.
All that is over & above of getting yourself a Cloud space on AWS & Azure.
What expertise is this and what skills does one need anyway?
One might pose another question that the said skills & expertise can be purchased from AWS & Azure to have the required support during the Public Cloud journey.
Yes, it is possible.
The CSP will offer support after you get stuck or if something breaks, to fix it. Now, let’s understand this, fixing will help you get rid of the symptom of the issue that may be rooted deep inside the configuration due to any kind of an error or a misuse of the tools available on these platforms. This could happen due to any reason – maybe the best practices weren’t followed, maybe due to an error that no one knows of, or any other cause for that matter that maybe beyond the understanding of the personnel working on it. Best practices can’t be sold or bought, they come from experience.
What if the best practices can be learnt from training & certifications?
Certainly, yes. However, the IT personnel will only have understanding of your own environment only, with the current configurations and the knowledge they gain from these certifications. Moreover, this process takes time and yet is not still accurate enough for you as a CIO or IT Leader to focus on more important tasks instead of getting into the nitty gritty of operations aspects.
What if just the CSP native tools could be used?
AWS & Azure do offer many tools to manage your Public Cloud Environment which include monitoring, optimization, advice on security & performance, etc. Hence, the short answer, again, is yes. The long answer, well, the recommendation is that monitoring your own environment from within your own environment is not the best idea. A third party tool gives your external view point of the performance of your IT environment running on Public Cloud. And this happens not just from the infrastructure perspective but also from the performance of the applications perspective.
What can a Managed Service Provider do here?
The good part of MSPs is that they constantly invest in skills, tools, expertise, knowledge and are exposed to diverse IT environments. They continually aim to optimize performance on Azure & AWS to get the best out of all the resources in a cost-effective way. They have systems to not just remotely monitor & manage your IT landscape but also have Back up & Disaster Recovery plans in place. They help you with complete transparency, reporting, patch management, incident & change management, security services and aim for continuous improvement.
Progression is a globally awarded IT Infrastructure Solution and Managed Services Provider, and provides services through Public Data Centres spread across India, including Progression’s own Data Centre and NOC in Gurgaon.
