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Help your clients master technological complexity with cloud-aware managed/hosted services

technological complexity by Quest

If your clients’ organizations are typical, they’re now using multiple cloud services – an average of five if they’re small or mid-sized, 18 if they’re large .

But while today’s hyperscale public cloud environments can often provide important capabilities far more effectively than in-house IT infrastructure, your clients may not quite realize that the data and applications they place in those clouds are theirs – not the cloud providers’.

Likewise, responsibility for the care and feeding of those data and applications is also up to your clients. Such responsibility can be daunting as cloud workloads add more technological complexity to their already intricate IT environments.

Needed: oversight and management

Complicated core business application performance needs monitoring and managing. Data and apps need resilient security and protection. Interactions between multiple public, private, and/or hybrid cloud environments need orchestrating and optimizing. And your clients’ diverse service-level agreements need to be rationalized.

Regardless of the ways your clients embrace cloud computing, a cloud-aware managed/hosted services provider can deliver the oversight and management their technology environments require, saving their IT staff resources for efforts devoted to innovation rather than battles with technological complexity.

These days, a cloud-aware managed/hosted services provider can function as a key technology partner able to help your clients address and manage strategic issues as well as ensure broad day-to-day support for their workloads and applications, whether these are cloud-resident, on-premises, or co-located.

What to look for in a cloud-aware managed/hosted services provider

So how do you help your clients choose the cloud-aware managed/hosted services provider that’s right for them?

You’ll certainly want to engage an experienced provider with a full portfolio of managed/hosted services, including:

  • Security ,
  • Online data backup ,
  • Network monitoring ,
  • Network management ,
  • Application management ,
  • Email migration , and
  • Messaging .

In addition, look for a provider that also can deliver four other essentials:

1    Assessment services that lay out the provider’s strategic insight and recommendations about what your clients need before they commit to anything.

2   A deep cloud services capability that includes a hyperscale public cloud platform offering key cloud infrastructure capabilities (IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, and DBaaS) as well as a global network of data centers and network operations centers to power both the provider’s managed/hosted services offerings and a suite of hybrid and other cloud services, such as desktops as a service (DaaS) , disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) , cloud-based application development , and cloud-based videoconferencing .

3    Professional services teams experienced in designing custom configurations – whether these are entirely remote, some on-premises, some co-located – so your clients’ cloud and managed/hosted services solutions are streamlined and efficient.

4    A way to configure all of the provider’s SLAs exactly the way your clients want , capability by capability, and bundle it into a single monthly payment.

Meet the Author
Adam Burke is Quest's Vice President of Sales and Partnerships.
Contact Quest Today  ˄
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