So, you have adopted, or have decided to opt for, cloud-based services. Congratulations! It is probably one of the best investments you will make in your business. But are you maximizing the returns on that investment?
Maintaining a cloud infrastructure in-house is costly, in terms of every resource you can think of: money, human resources, and time.
What are Cloud Managed Services?
A cloud managed service provider specialises in IT management and technical support for cloud-based services, for all types of cloud computing environments – public, private, and hybrid. You can outsource your daily IT management to them, and they will automate and enhance your business operations.
Notably, cloud managed services cover:
- Cloud Security
- Cloud Computing
- Cloud Storage
- Network Operations
- Application Stacks
- Vendors
- Monitoring & Reporting
- Performance Testing
- Backup & Recovery
- … and more.
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5 Ways Cloud Managed Services Can Fuel Your Business
#1. Saving Your Precious Resources
Hiring a cloud-managed service provider can help you to hugely reduce:
- your network maintenance costs,
- your hiring, training, and retention costs for maintaining a full-time IT department in-house,
- the time-to-cloud, and
- the time you invest in maintaining your cloud-based services.
This does not, however, compromise the quality of services you get. Cloud management services encompass quick response through enterprise-level monitoring and remote services. With their capabilities, virtually any network issue can be accessed, monitored, and repaired remotely by a cloud-managed service provider. On-site support is provided when necessary.
Cloud managed services let you leverage robust network infrastructure without incurring any heavy initial set-up or maintenance costs, leaving your resources free to be allocated to other aspects of your business.
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#2. Predictable, Recurring Monthly Costs Combined with Ease of Scalability
As your business grows, your IT requirements are also increasing. What this essentially means is that you either need to invest heavily in the cloud infrastructure in the beginning or keep provisioning for upgrades on a regular basis. Often, though, resources would be hard to allocate and therefore upgrades would be slow to be rolled out, affecting business. You may also find that there is a mismatch between your requirements and the available upgrades in the market.
Hiring a cloud managed service provider gives you the best flexibility in this regard – you start with the infrastructure that fits your requirements, at a fixed monthly cost – thus helping you provision well in advance for the expenses. And as your requirements grow, you shift to higher plans to fit both your budget and your needs.
Scaling costs can also often be customized seasonally. If you require higher support for only a few months during the year, or during a particular time of the day, why should you pay for the whole year or whole day? For example, a taxation service provider may have increased activity during the tax season, which would be in the last quarter of the financial year, while an online learning institute may need the most support in the evenings when students are online after school or work. In either case, higher plans can be opted for during the time of peak activity rather than wasting money on bandwidth you do not need.
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#3. Centrally Managed Network and Updated Applications
Cloud management services also include management of all network, applications, and servers in a central data center of the service provider. This means:
- increased network availability for your remote users, who can access centralized data and virtual services within the network.
- virtually unlimited storage and regular backup into a centralized network.
- rapid data transference and processing large data in real-time.
Another benefit of hiring a cloud managed service provider is that their networks, security, and applications are always updated, so your business does not need any downtime to upgrade in-house systems.
#4. Disaster Recovery-as-a-Service (DRaaS)
Loss of data can be destructive for any business. At the same time, building redundancies and maintaining/managing regular backups is costly and time-consuming. A cloud managed service provider however has the ability to maintain the required networks and data centers with adequate redundancy and resiliency, thus ensuring business continuity. Cloud management services include protecting data generated across all your cloud services and applications, by keeping it safe and secured in the deployed cloud environment. This is usually achieved by maintaining regular data backups of the managed services. There would also be dedicated professionals who would act quickly during downtime and bring services back online as fast as possible, as well as recover lost data with efficiency. All this ensures that your business operations will continue with minimal downtime in case a disaster causes a major data disrupt.
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#5. Data Safety & Cyber-Security
The threat of Cyber criminals is ever-growing and your business is always a potential victim. Businesses lose billions each year from these data hacks and intrusions. If you have outdated, unprotected, or otherwise mismanaged in-house hardware and software, you are harbouring unnecessary security issues. Cloud management services include rigorous monitoring of your network activity. Dedicated security teams closely watch your network 24/7 to keep your operations, network, and data safe, and fend off any attempted attacks. Further, cloud-based services being off-site helps prevent physical attacks on your data, too.
Final Words
Cloud management services are really the next logical step to cloud migration and critical to your business. In today’s technology-dependent world, cloud managed service providers help you manage your data, support your business’ personalized cloud environment, and most importantly, help achieve your business goals in the most resource-efficient way possible. Such services render you a smart, distributed, and cloud structure to guarantee a powerful application development environment.