Managed cloud services are the partial or complete management and control of a customer’s cloud platform, including migration, maintenance and optimization. By using a managed cloud service provider, a company can ensure that its cloud resources run. A record number of companies are investing in infrastructure “as a service” (XaaS) and moving some or all of their IT infrastructure to public clouds, including moving their databases to the cloud. The cloud promises easy configuration, simplified management, guaranteed availability, and on-demand scalability with little or no oversight or hassle.
Managed cloud services provide partial or complete cloud management for public environments as well as hybrid IT. Each cloud managed service provider (MCSP) offers a different value by addressing certain aspects. MCSP responsibilities can include migration, optimization, security, configuration, and optimization. Typical advantages of MCSPs are resource optimization, cloud integration, and a fixed expense.
However, MCSP costs are often high, performance is not ideal, and multiple tenancy can lead to data protection issues. According to Gartner, “A managed service provider (MSP) provides services, such as networks, applications, infrastructure and security, through ongoing and regular support and active management at customers’ premises, in their MSP’s data center (hosting) or in a third-party data center”. MSPs can offer their native services in conjunction with the services of other providers (for example, a security MSP that provides systems management over a third-party cloud IaaS). Pure-play MSPs focus on a single vendor or technology, usually their core offerings.
Many MSPs include services from other types of providers. The term MSP traditionally applied to infrastructure or device-centric services, but has been expanded to include ongoing and regular administration, maintenance, and support. With an external managed services team, you get a more complete team, better controls and balances, and more streamlined processes than you can see on an internal team. Managed cloud service providers can serve as a replacement for internal cloud IT or as a complement to internal teams.
If you’re thinking about working with a managed cloud service provider, there are several advantages and disadvantages you can consider. Fully managed, it offers a full range of cybersecurity services designed to keep your organization and data safe. The best fully managed cloud services save your company money in the long run by providing high performance and multi-protocol support that allows you to easily accelerate cloud volumes. Failure correction is an antiquated way of looking at IT that can be completely replaced by fully managed services, while internal IT and managed services can complement each other.
Certified support personnel fully manage the underlying cloud and security infrastructure, while all cloud resources, including network bandwidth, vCPU, disk, and memory resources, are provisioned and managed efficiently and with rapid elasticity. For organizations with less experience managing secure government cloud hosting environments and who want the peace of mind of having an experienced all-inclusive cloud management team at their side, fully managed cloud hosting may be the right choice for you. Instead of relying on the knowledge of just one or a handful of in-house staff, you benefit from the expertise of an experienced managed services team. With the rapid evolution of technology in this area, such as virtual servers, cloud providers have been able to reduce the costs of managed cloud services without sacrificing key benefits.
As used in the technology industry, the term “managed services” has a precise meaning, particularly for companies that call themselves managed service providers (or MSPs). Managed cloud services enable businesses to harness the power of cloud computing without the pain of becoming experts in everything. Partner onboarding is possibly the area where there is the greatest disparity between fully managed EDI solutions and those claiming to offer managed EDI. With a better understanding of the differences between managed and fully managed EDI, I hope you are now more aware of the questions you need to ask potential vendors to establish the scope of your offering and make the right decision.
While not all managed solutions offer exactly the same services and some offer more than others, none can compete with fully managed solutions in terms of the extent to which they relieve pressure on internal teams.