Top 5 reasons why an organization needs a managed Cloud Service Provider in 2018

"By 2020, 24% of the total addressable IT market will be cloud." - Gartner

From one industry to another, cloud computing has been disrupting different business models. Be it a one-person shop, a startup or a global enterprise, all are moving their services or workloads from on- premises servers, datacenters to the cloud. The core aim of this move is to increase their return on investment (ROI) and reduce the total cost of ownership (TCO) of their IT infrastructure.

Cloud solutions offer a number of benefits, like reduced costs, scalability of resources, ability to improve service quality and build competitive products or to summarize, empower business innovation.

Despite the fact that the cloud has the ability to transform key aspects of businesses and digitize every bit of value created and brought to the marketplace, it's really hard for IT pros and decision makers to keep pace with the changes that cloud is constantly and relentlessly bringing in.

Constantly evolving IT landscape

The best thing about the cloud is that it is simple – you can easily buy it with a credit card. But the other side of the coin is, simply having a cloud infrastructure in place does not guarantee a business of all the tangible benefits that it brings. Just migrating things to the cloud doesn't automatically make them more efficient or meaningful to the business. In the present scenario, use of cloud technology has shifted from being an operational consideration to one of strategic importance.

"Using cloud services is not enough. It's the way you use cloud managed services that matters. Developing your applications in a 'Wild West' style where 'anything goes' can result in costly sprawl, lack of leverage and high cost maintenance, resulting in significant technical and architectural debt. You have to optimize your applications for cloud computing with the explicit purpose of getting the most value at the lowest effective cost." - Dona Scott, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner.

As per the research conducted by London School of Economics and Political Science, IT pros and decision makers are feeling breathless with their investments in cloud computing as they spend more than expected time in managing their cloud services.

Challenges that organizations face with in-house IT staff

Complexity of managing an array of IT infrastructure - Today, organizations leverage different cloud platforms for their daily operations- each demand varying skill sets with different standards from the in-house IT department.

Thus, there is a lag in the organization's ability to fully utilize these cloud platforms, due to a lack of skilled professionals and they have to spend a big percentage of their IT budget annually, on training their staff.

Moreover, digital literacy of IT staff and their receptiveness to emerging technologies is low, resulting in the misalignment of cloud skills. This results in missing out on the simplicity, agility and tangible benefits the cloud technology brings to an organization.

Constant need to stay up to date - With global markets becoming increasingly competitive on both technology and business fronts, it is important for a business to stay up-to-date with the very latest developments and innovations that cloud technology facilitates.

Moreover, there is an increase in the complexities with multi-cloud environments which make it difficult for enterprises to stay on the cutting edge of the technology with cloud platforms like AWS, Microsoft Azure, and Google, releasing constant stream of new features and updates.

An obsolete IT workforce struggling to keep up with the cloud dynamism will give competitors the lead, if it is unable to quickly respond to the changing market conditions.

Following graphics show the cloud skills that the enterprises find hard to recruit and the skills that the enterprises are paying heavily for:

Thus, to manage and operate a successful cloud infrastructure, an army of experts should be in place.

And this is where the managed cloud service providers come in.

Top 5 reasons why companies choose managed cloud service providers over in - house IT staff

1. 1. Automatic and worry - free maintenance and ease of resource management

Cloud service providers maintain experts who are skilled at application migration and cloud infrastructure management. They deliver value to the customers by offering proactive monitoring, automation, and management of customers' environments. They assist customers by:

• Reviewing their business needs

• Assessing their readiness to move to cloud

• Designing scalable and secure cloud architecture for them

• Migrating their apps and data to the cloud platform

• Managing cloud round the clock with accountable and always accessible support

2. 2. Reduced costs in terms of deployment and maintenance

Cloud service providers help organizations shift from capital to operational expenditure (capex to opex), which leads to lower total cost of ownership. Thus, customers are able to save themselves from unnecessary expenditure on server maintenance, software licensing and upgrades.

Cloud providers employ trained developers to build software differentiation on the high-performance infrastructure. Customers just pay for what they use as the capital costs associated with data center maintenance, networking and storage are taken care by CSPs.

3. 3. Faster time to deployment

Customers get the ability to scale up and down as per their requirements and access up-to-date technology and faster implementation times for new applications and business processes.

4. 4. Advanced security measures

"Through 2020, 95% of cloud security issues will be the organization's fault, not the cloud provider's" - Gartner.

With Cloud providers, businesses feel safe. The best providers have their full security breakdown available for enterprises' compliance or security department. They have their own security engineers to maintain and protect customers' applications and data.

They offer multiple security measures like single or multiple factor authentication, data encryption while allowing one to own the encryption keys, data loss prevention based offerings to alert for potential security vulnerabilities.

5. 5. Management of new IT environment and digital transformation goals

Cloud service providers serve as a conduit by helping companies in "keeping the lights on" for all aspects of their cloud business operations as given below.

Thus, with cloud service providers, organizations can add real value to their business.

For further discussion on the topic with the cloud industry leaders, register for World Cloud Summit 2017 here.