Considering a Cloud Migration? 6 Reasons to Use an MSP

Most businesses have either moved to the cloud or are seriously considering making the transition soon. If your organization is looking to initiate a cloud migration, it’s essential to know exactly what this entails, and understand that without support managing the cloud environment can be more complex than you might expect. 

IT executives in companies of all sizes and across industries have found that working closely with a managed service provider (MSP) is key to implementing the best cloud-based solutions to achieve the business outcomes they desire. 

Here are six reasons to use an MSP to move your business to the cloud.

#1. Skill and Experience

A reputable MSP leverages a team of certified cloud technologists and engineering professionals that can pull from years of experience to provide guidance on what cloud model will work best for your organization—now and in the future. 

Working with an MSP enables you to tap into cloud migration-specific expertise to chart a new course for your IT environment. This takes into consideration your goals, resources and existing technology to develop a comprehensive plan tailored for your organization that adheres to best practices. 

The best MSPs invest in their internal team, ensuring their expert cloud technology specialists consistently advance their knowledge and skills to support a diverse range of customers. As a customer, you get to take advantage of a depth and breadth of experience developed across industry verticals and various sizes of deployments. This lets you focus your team on business initiatives while the MSP manages your cloud infrastructure, setting a foundation for your organization to grow and thrive.

Rather than grappling with a laundry list of unknowns in-house, the right MSP will work closely with your stakeholders to understand your business objectives and create a strategy that aligns with your needs. The MSP will ready your organization for a smooth deployment, guide you through the process, and provide ongoing management and support in a way that frees your internal team to focus on what they do best.

#2. Security

Cyberattacks are becoming increasingly sophisticated and frequent, so there’s a lot at stake when you move to the cloud. Working with an MSP means you can bolster cybersecurity and data protection in the cloud environment without the struggles that come with managing security in-house. 

Securing your cloud requires a multi-layered approach. The concept of the shared responsibility model is often referenced by the public cloud companies, but isn’t always well understood. An MSP can help to fill many of the gaps that aren’t covered by the hyperscaler and otherwise left for you to protect against.

An MSP will have skilled cybersecurity experts on staff with robust cyber capabilities and solutions. Rather than needing to build and manage your security measures independently, partnering with a third-party gives you access to fully managed security services or assistance to integrate existing tools to work seamlessly with the cloud environment. 

At Carbon60, for example, our managed cloud solutions are built with security at the forefront, taking a holistic approach to mitigating risks and threats, ensuring a secure posture for your cloud solution.

#3. Cost Containment

Before you consider handling a cloud migration independently, you should know that establishing and running a data centre for your organization can be a costly undertaking. It requires making significant capital investments upfront to purchase equipment and hiring highly-skilled professionals to install and manage the systems. Working with an MSP eliminates the need to sink capital in hardware that will age and gradually become obsolete. 

If IT isn’t the core focus of your business, as it is for an MSP, your cloud infrastructure can become a cumbersome cost centre. When you move your business to the cloud with an MSP, on the other hand, you’ll be able to offload tasks from your limited internal resources, reducing overhead expenses, enabling operational agility and increasing efficiency.

Partnering with an MSP will also allow you to adopt a hosting solution that can be optimized for performance and cost. You only pay for what you need and the MSP adapts for capacity management and capital costs. 

#4. Application Modernization

Moving to the cloud is essential to modernize your organization’s data platforms. To keep up with the speed of business in the modern marketplace and remain competitive, you need access to timely analytics and the ability to extract actionable insights from your organization’s data. You can put these insights to work in ways that optimize operations, advance innovation and accelerate your business. 

Application modernization sometimes holds companies back from moving to the cloud, but it doesn’t have to be a barrier. Taking full advantage of a public cloud means refactoring your application from monolithic to microservices. And in a hosted private or virtual private cloud, it means taking a lift and shift approach. Without skilled and knowledgeable support, these aren’t simple tasks.

Modernizing your application through an MSP offers the help you need for modernization by providing access to CI/CD pipelines, enabling serverless computing and permitting fast access to business insights with a scalable, high performance IT infrastructure that’s able to process large data sets.  

#5. Flexibility and Scalability

The right managed cloud hosting service can deliver a hybrid solution that works for your organization and meets the compliance and regulatory requirements of your industry and clientele.

An MSP can extend your global presence with infrastructure support across the globe, presenting your applications closer to your end users with an enhanced user experience while addressing data sovereignty requirements for your customers.

If your business demands a quick turn-around to activate a new temporary site, develop and test new applications or add more capacity as-needed, an MSP offers the foundation to efficiently integrate these requirements using standardized, tested processes that you can trust.

#6. Backups, Recovery and Business Continuity

An MSP should also offer solutions engineered to protect the integrity of your data, eliminating the need for you to build and maintain your own off-site backup target or backup repositories. 

To reliably ensure business continuity, an MSP can handle backups and protections for operating if system outages, interruptions or unplanned downtime occurs. If your primary site faces a security attack or fails, you can rest assured that you have a recent copy and the ability to quickly restore and recover from data loss.

An ideal MSP partner will go beyond offering simple backup solutions to protect your organization’s data, key workloads, business priorities and compliance needs, every step of the way.

Cloud Migration with an MSP

Using a managed service provider to move your business to the cloud means tapping into the expertise of professionals that know how to design, monitor, manage and secure your organization’s IT infrastructure in a cloud environment. 

An MSP can help you make the right decision based on where you are in your journey. This could be an all-in-one public cloud right now, managed hosting (virtual or private cloud) or a hybrid solution. The right partner will work at your pace based on resources, priority, risk, cost and your organization’s general readiness for change.

When it comes to your cloud migration and everything that follows, from incident response to capacity planning, you can rely on an MSP to deliver their core business services, so you can depend on their team as an extension of your own. In other words, MSPs are there to lessen the burden IT can place on your organization; you don’t have to handle it all.

If your organization is considering a cloud migration and looking for an MSP partner, contact us to discuss your needs.

Carbon60 is an MSP dedicated to helping businesses maximize the performance and security of their core application infrastructure with an agnostic cloud approach using public and hosted private clouds.  A partner with both Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure along with major cloud and data centre technology companies, we have the experience and the expertise to support organizations wherever they might be on their cloud journey.