How Cloud Managed Services Future-Proof Your Business
As the business world grows increasingly interconnected with the digital realm, organizations must ask:
“Are we doing enough to stay competitive?”
To keep up with evolving — and sometimes turbulent — economic and business conditions, many organizations are looking to innovative technologies for a competitive advantage.
Source: Flexera’s 2022 State of the Cloud Report and Google Cloud research report
In today’s modern business environment, expanding your organization’s capabilities for growth, operational resilience, and cost efficiency requires swift adoption of technologies like the cloud — and both large and small enterprises alike can benefit from the support of cloud managed services.
What are Cloud Managed Services?
Cloud managed services refer to outsourcing cloud management tasks to a third-party partner.
The scope of cloud managed services can vary vastly depending on your organization’s existing internal cloud expertise. For instance, if your organization has an established cloud team, you may only need cloud managed services to assist you with development or cybersecurity elements.
On the other hand, if your IT is modest, cloud managed services can offer you the end-to-end support you need to leverage the full capabilities of cloud technologies without overburdening your team.
As for the third-party partner mentioned before, this is your cloud managed services provider.
A cloud managed services provider ensures you have all the resources, infrastructure, and experienced support necessary to utilize the cloud fully. Whether your organization needs partial or complete cloud management, a cloud provider can handle a wide range of tasks, including:
- Cloud optimization and development
- Migrations and implementations
- Configurations and customization
- Cybersecurity and maintenance
Cloud managed services overall enable organizations to maximize their operational efficiency without breaking the bank on cloud investments. After all, you need not only the technology itself but also the expert talent to monitor and manage the cloud after implementation properly.
The 7 Essential Benefits of Cloud Managed Services
The mass migration to the cloud is clear as day, but why are so many organizations turning to cloud managed services companies rather than onboarding their own in-house cloud teams?
Cloud managed services provide organizations across all industries with a slew of benefits that make a cloud provider partnership highly lucrative. With a cloud provider, your organization can take cloud-based platforms, products, and services to market faster and with far fewer operational challenges.
The following seven benefits of cloud managed services make them a necessary investment for modern businesses:
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Future-Proofed Technology
Though sometimes overlooked, one of the top advantages of cloud managed services is that your provider oversees all system upgrades for you. Keeping advanced technologies up to date and secure takes substantial talent and human resources that your organization may not have to spare. With the help of a cloud managed services provider, you gain access to future-proofed technology that can automatically update and deploy improvements.
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Lower Infrastructure Costs
Rather than having to purchase and replace on-site servers, cloud managed services manage all of the physical components on your behalf. This eliminates the need for spending capital on the necessary hardware to support cloud platforms and solutions, significantly cutting the costs of maintaining a digital infrastructure for your business. Moreover, a cloud provider alleviates your team from the burden of managing, maintaining, and deploying cloud solutions, allowing them to spend more time on business innovation and growth objectives
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Inherent Scalability
The ability to scale quickly without disrupting crucial business operations is a must in today’s fast-paced and highly digital business environment. Cloud managed services offer high scalability that enables your organization to leverage (and, thereby, pay for) only the resources and talent needed at any given moment. As a result, as your business scales up, you can increase the scope of your cloud provider’s role in your organization. Should your business experience budget cuts or establish a more robust in-house IT team, your cloud provider can easily help you scale down your cloud services to the level that best fits your current needs
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Heightened Flexibility
Because cloud solutions can deploy additional resources on an as-needed basis, organizations achieve a higher level of flexibility, adaptability, and overall operational resilience. By comparison, legacy systems and technologies are not readily adaptable to modern advancements and applications, causing organizations to have to purchase and maintain multiple different systems to achieve even a moderate amount of operational efficiency. Cloud managed services ensure your organization has the underlying support and infrastructure necessary to adapt on a dime without the burden of updating costly and outdated systems.
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Greater Resource Availability
Legacy technologies do not provide modern organizations with access to a wide enough pool of resources, whether that’s development capabilities, computing power, or anything in between. Yet, investing in the cloud without the right level of support can also be daunting, as it requires significant monetary and developmental resources. With cloud managed services, your organization gains access to plentiful on-demand resources. These resources can be deployed at any time and with a high level of responsiveness, further enhancing your business’s scalability and flexibility along the way.
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Disaster Recovery Support
Natural disasters, cybercrimes, and geopolitical conflicts are increasingly prevalent in today’s society. As a result, organizations find themselves facing a growing pool of vulnerabilities that can result in significant data losses and operational downtime. Whether it’s a destructive storm, a ransomware attack, or international tensions, any of these events can spell disaster for organizations storing all of their information and physical infrastructure in one location. One of the key benefits of cloud managed services is the opportunity to achieve both physical and digital redundancy, ensuring you remain functional in the face of disaster
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Enhanced Security
Cybersecurity is of the utmost importance in the wake of digitally transformative solutions like the cloud. While the cloud certainly has tremendous potential to improve your security strategy, it can also introduce new security concerns and vulnerabilities if not properly managed. A cloud managed services provider can configure cloud solutions to meet your specific security needs and enable automated monitoring and alerts to keep your system continuously protected. Additionally, specialized cloud providers can improve your compliance strategy and ensure your platform and applications meet all relevant regulatory requirements.
Ultimately, many organizations turn to the cloud thanks to the convenience, efficiency, and security cloud managed services companies can offer. In turn, an organization can focus its in-house teams on generating greater value for customers and acting as a disruptive, innovative force within a specific industry.
How Do Cloud Managed Services Work?
Cloud managed services provide your organization with tailored support based on your specific needs. This can encompass cloud services for public, private, and hybrid clouds, including comprehensive support for implementation and migration activities.
In many cases, organizations choose to work with cloud managed service providers before selecting a cloud solution or beginning the implementation process, enabling them to take full advantage of their provider’s consultative expertise to determine the best implementation and configuration strategy.
Moreover, cloud managed services alleviate businesses from several key technical responsibilities beyond implementation and configuration, such as infrastructure maintenance and compliance management. The cloud managed service provider also often operates and maintains any necessary data centers and ensures data is available through the cloud for authorized parties.
All of these resources and support services are made available to businesses on demand and typically utilize APIs to simplify integration processes.
Let’s look at a few different cloud managed services models to better understand how this all works:
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IaaS:
Infrastructure as a service (IaaS), as the name suggests, encompasses all of the infrastructure elements of the cloud. This includes the provision of servers and storage, networking security, and data centers. Through an IaaS solution, organizations can rely on a trusted outsourced cloud infrastructure while handling the more custom aspects in-house — such as platform optimization and application development. IaaS is typically best suited for organizations that need assistance managing their digital infrastructure but have the internal expertise necessary for custom development and deployment.
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PaaS:
Platform as a service (PaaS) takes IaaS to the next level by incorporating operating systems and platform-based development. Platform managed services are generally considered a subset of cloud managed services, providing organizations with highly specialized services and solutions for one or multiple platforms. For example, if a company wants to leverage the Amazon Web Services (AWS) platform, a cloud managed services provider specialized in AWS could help not only manage the company’s cloud infrastructure but also oversee the configuration and customization of the AWS platform.
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SaaS:
Software as a service (SaaS) is the most comprehensive cloud managed services model, delivering end-to-end solutions that cover everything from implementation and deployment to continuous updating and application development. Along with platform management capabilities, SaaS solutions often provide organizations with robust developmental talent, allowing for the creation and deployment of highly specialized and custom applications. This is especially vital for organizations hoping to diversify their channels, as SaaS solutions can assist greatly with establishing a seamless omnichannel approach to cloud services.
Why are Cloud Managed Services So Vital for Businesses?
While cloud managed services stand out for their numerous advantages, your organization may still be on the fence regarding a cloud migration. The cloud certainly comes with a learning curve, as well as upfront implementation investments that can make any business pause before making the commitment.
Yet, embracing cloud managed services is often the key to modernizing business operations and becoming a digital leader within your specific industry.
Here’s some of the top reasons why cloud managed services are crucial in the modern business era:
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Efficient & Seamless Deployments:
Continuous development and deployment are nearly necessities in today’s digital world. With cloud managed services, your business can deploy code at much faster rates and with more seamless rollouts. Plus, modern cloud-based development environments aim to reduce downtime as much as possible, if not eliminate it entirely.
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Improved Business Insights:
Having on-demand access to data from remotely managed data centers is no small advantage. Cloud managed services provide your organization with the data capabilities and analytics needed to generate more accurate and timely business insights. As a result, innovation becomes interwoven into your organization’s operations, with all business activities driven by comprehensive data and a scalable infrastructure.
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Simplified Compliance:
Regulatory compliance is a massive challenge for all types of organizations, especially those in highly regulated industries like finance and healthcare. Cloud managed service providers simplify digital compliance by developing solutions that fit within the bounds of your specific regulatory requirements. Additionally, cloud managed services can establish an automated compliance strategy that instantly addresses regulatory changes.
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Heightened Business Continuity:
By partnering with a cloud managed services provider, your organization can side-step costly recruitment, onboarding, and training processes that disrupt business continuity. A cloud managed services provider ensures you have not just the digital resources but also the teams and talent necessary without the need for additional hiring. Plus, your existing teams experience substantially more free time to focus on business innovation and customer needs rather than the management and maintenance of complex technologies.
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Modernized Customer Experiences:
The importance of the customer experience cannot be understated in today’s digitally-forward society. Customers have grown much more expectant of tailored, personalized experiences that address their specific wants and needs. Cloud managed services allow your organization to build modern customer experiences that go above and beyond expectations, winning you a loyal returning clientele along the way.
How to Choose a Cloud Managed Services Provider
You know the benefits of cloud managed services and you are ready to get started — but how can you determine the best cloud managed services provider for your organization?
Selecting a cloud managed services company comes down to four key factors:
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Industry Specialization:
The top priority when choosing a cloud managed services provider is finding a provider specialized within your specific industry. Each industry has its own challenges when it comes to implementing cloud solutions, whether that’s enabling the right channels for different customers or meeting compliance requirements in highly regulated sectors. By working with a provider that has not only cloud expertise but also proven experience within your industry, you can rest assured your cloud solutions will provide the competitive edge you need.
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Platform Specialization:
Along with industry specialization, your organization should also seek out a cloud managed services provider with specialized expertise in a variety of different cloud platforms. Whether you plan on using one or multiple platforms, having a cloud services partner that understands the technical complexities of your ideal platforms is key. A cloud managed services provider with platform expertise can ensure your system and integrations run smoothly
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Transparent Pricing:
If cost efficiency is one of the top benefits of cloud managed services, then transparent pricing is an absolute must-have from a cloud managed services provider. To ensure your business has the flexibility and scalability necessary to achieve sustainable growth, work with providers that offer transparent cloud managed services pricing models.
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Consultative Services:
An excellent cloud migration starts with a comprehensive consultation. Any cloud managed services provider worth your time will offer consultative services that analyze your current digital infrastructure and identify key areas for improvement. Your provider should supply you with the support necessary to plan an effective cloud strategy, from implementation to continuous development and improvement.
Partner with Exadel for Expert Cloud Managed Services
At Exadel, our cloud and IT managed services help you focus on what matters most.
With years of specialized expertise across many industries and cloud platforms, Exadel can assist you in managing your strategic applications and cloud solutions.
Starting with a comprehensive consultation, our teams look at where your business currently stands, your organizational goals, and the best strategies for achieving those goals. After helping you build a core system and infrastructure, Exadel provides the custom development and ongoing support your need to establish a resilient and adaptable cloud environment.
We provide you with the end-to-end cloud services you require, including:
- DevOps and Service Management: Exadel’s DevOps teams are experts in rapid development and deployment of cloud applications and infrastructure solutions. We help you avoid downtime as you complete your cloud migration and bring new services and products to market quickly.
- Platform Enhancements: Through partnership with Exadel, cloud platform upgrades and customizations have never been easier. We enable you to utilize new capabilities and seize business opportunities with speed and finesse.
- System Optimization: Continuous enhancements of the core platforms that underpin your organization are essential to stay competitive in today’s digital business environments. Exadel provides ongoing support to keep your cloud platform up-to-date and optimized at all times.
- Regulatory Compliance: As regulatory compliance becomes more complicated in the wake of technological advancements, Exadel is here to ensure your organization keeps up with the rapidly increasing pace of regulatory change.
To become the digital leader of tomorrow, your business needs cloud managed services you can rely on long-term. Reach out to the Exadel team today to schedule your first no-cost consultation.
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