If your business relies on managed cloud solutions, it should help you to cut down costs and facilitate scaling. Read this article till the end to get to know about the other benefits of cloud managed service providers.
Businesses of nearly any scale and sphere can benefit from cloud managed services. The popularity of such solutions has been increasing dramatically all over the world. According to a report from Markets and Markets, by 2025, the global cloud managed services (CMS) market size is projected to reach $116.2 billion. From this article, you’ll get to know about the advantages of CMS and will be able to decide whether you should try them.
What Are Cloud Managed Services?
First, let’s start with the definition of cloud services. This term denotes an extensive range of services delivered on demand to businesses and private clients over the Internet. Such services can be rather complex, so you might need to hire an in-house team of specialists to manage them. And what if you’re not ready to hire? Then, you can outsource these duties to a provider.
While a third-party company takes care of your cloud solutions, you can fully focus on your immediate duties. A dedicated team can offer the following types of services for your managed cloud.
- Monitor
- Maintain
- Update
- Restore in case of a disaster
The provider can be responsible for your cloud security, computing, storage, network operations, application stacks and all the other related tasks. More and more companies realize the advantages of this approach and consequently, the cloud managed services market is witnessing an accelerated growth.
Benefits of Cloud Managed Service Providers
Cost Efficiency
If you opt for this type of service, your expenses will be flat and predictable. You’ll be able to plan your budget months or even years in advance. You’ll select a specific support tier and you’ll ramp up or down depending on your requirements.
You’ll outsource the support to your provider and won’t need to handle the maintenance yourself. The provider will deliver 24/7 live chat support, dedicated services at a fraction of the cost that you would need to pay if you hired a team
Most likely, you’ll be able to pay for all your expenses with one invoice. Businesses with in-house teams that manage cloud migration projects might need to deal with several different organizations, which often leads to cost overruns and frustrations.
Flexibility and Scalability
Cloud managed services are probably the best solution for organizations that are experiencing rapid business growth. As you scale, the provider will take care of the cloud migration plan, hardware assets and staff training. The risks of downtimes will be reduced to a minimum.
Scaling with the help of cloud technologies will be smooth and seamless. You just inform the provider about your needs and it will suggest a perfect solution for you. Moreover, the provider can proactively explore and identify enhancements that it can introduce to let your company quicker achieve its goals.
Thanks to cloud managed services, startups, small and medium businesses get access to the same opportunities as large companies and enterprises. This gives them a significant competitive edge and facilitates their development.
Reliability and High Performance
Since your provider will maintain around-the-clock control of the cloud environment, you’ll get highly reliable service. If any issues come up, the provider will get rid of them as quickly as possible. Thanks to modern and powerful mechanisms of identifying potential threats, the cloud infrastructure is continuously functioning at optimal levels.
High reliability is synonymous with high availability. Your online business will always have enough bandwidth, data storage and uptime. Even with heavy loads, cloud managed services will go uninterrupted. Excellent performance shortens time to market and your company will benefit from standardization and automation of business processes.
Disaster Recovery
Governmental bodies, financial institutions, healthcare companies and other businesses that deal with sensitive customer data value cloud managed services highly. Thanks to data recovery solutions, you’ll be able to back up the following components to a safe location.
- Operating systems
- File systems
- Customer data
- Applications
- Existing configurations
After the disaster, you’ll be able to restore the cloud environment in its entirety, with all the policies, procedures and infrastructure architecture. Your business operations will keep on running with minimum or even zero downtime. No data breach or attempt of a cyberattack will be able to seriously damage your business.
By the way, working with a cloud managed service provider might also help you to remain compliant with regulations like PCI or HIPAA. You’ll be able to quickly respond to any new regulations in your industry and adapt to the changing business environment.
Your provider can automatically control failover between hardware hosts and resource balancing at the virtualization level. If a hosting server fails, another one can take its place immediately. If you opt for an on-premise server instead of a cloud solution, its recovery after a disaster will be much more complex and expensive.
High-Quality Support
Most providers of cloud managed services offer 24/7 support. Clients can get in touch with dedicated teams of experienced engineers through multiple communication channels, including phone calls, messengers, email and live chat. When an issue arises, you won’t need to rely on your own guesswork or basic research. The support team will help you to make informed decisions — and you’ll appreciate their quick response times.
If your in-house professionals have some skills gaps, regular communication with the support team should help them to get the necessary knowledge. You won’t need to conduct costly training for your employees — most likely, they already know the basics and need to update their competencies only in selected spheres.
Final Thoughts
Hopefully, this article came in handy and now you better understand the specifics and benefits of cloud managed service providers. If you opt for this type of service, you’ll appreciate its high performance and flexibility and your business will be able to scale seamlessly. You’ll avoid excessive expenses and in case of a disaster, all your information and infrastructure will be quickly restored. You won’t need to manage and maintain the cloud environment yourself because the provider will do it for you. In a nutshell, cloud managed services will help you to save time, funds and effort.
