4 Things Every Services Provider Should Know About Enterprise Clouds
By Ellen Rubin, CEO of ClearSky Data
If you’re a managed service provider (MSP), you know the drill: your customers hear about an innovative trend and look to you to turn this into real business results quickly. As cloud computing gains broad market adoption, your customers have high hopes that you can deliver the cloud’s economics, flexibility and on-demand capacity to their existing data center environments while keeping their top business priorities in mind. In other words, they see the potential for innovation, and they can’t wait to see the results — with you leading the way.
Luckily, today’s MSPs are up to the challenge. In response to customer needs, MSPs are adding cloud services to their standard portfolios, developing intellectual property and rolling out tailored cloud service plans. As a result, according to IDC, 51 percent of companies hosting compute and storage on Amazon Web Services (AWS) are moving their data back on-premise or enlisting third-party providers to manage public cloud services for them. Fifty-eight percent of those companies report finding better prices when they work with third-party service providers.
If you’re new to the enterprise cloud bandwagon, it’s not too late to get started. But to avoid “cloudwashing” traditional offerings and instead create services with true customer value, here are four tips for building cloud into your business.
1. Stop repurposing third-party hardware. Or at least, realize that this long-standing practice is no longer enough to meet the new expectations of your enterprise customers. These customers are investing in you for your expertise, leadership and creativity, not your ability to repackage and resell products at a good deal. Meet their needs by adding value to every service and offering in your arsenal, whether you’re extending the capabilities of an open source platform or building your intellectual property on top of commodity hardware.
2. Assume every service should support the cloud. Your service portfolio should provide multiple flavors of hybrid solutions to support different workloads and requirements, integrating the cloud throughout your offerings. Customers may leverage public clouds, deploy hybrid strategies or expect you to build, manage and leverage internal clouds. Your solutions should be ready to scale, integrate and cut costs as you support each of these relevant business models.
3. Brush up on your development skills. Once you succeed in helping customers leverage the cloud to meet their business needs, get ready to support their business’ rapid growth. In this situation, it’s more valuable to think like a software developer than a traditional service provider. Open source platforms may help avoid some of the complexity and costs usually spurred by vendor-backed hardware, but the real business value will take root when you add your own IP to open source software to create differentiated services and boost your customers’ returns on investment (ROI).
To reap these benefits, you may need to expand your team and devote new efforts to retaining developer talent. Your in-house developers must be comfortable navigating application program interfaces (APIs), leveraging open source code and enlisting an array of development and operations (DevOps) tools. It’s not enough to rely on outdated technologies and pre-packaged offerings, and the skill set of your internal team must reflect this mindset.
4. Know that proactive security measures have become the status quo. Enterprise expectations have grown for today’s MSPs. In some cases, MSPs are expected to uphold higher standards than the internal IT shops they service. When customers put data outside their firewalls and hold you responsible for protecting it, it’s no longer acceptable to approach data security with your head in the sand. Instead, show your enterprise customers you’re building in layers of protection as you handle their data across physical locations, hardware and software platforms and operational controls. Encryption has become table stakes for service providers, and adhering to compliance regulations is a shared responsibility across the IT industry.
“Cloud” doesn’t have to be a tired buzzword if you can use it as an effective business strategy. Enterprises are exploring a range of emerging cloud technologies, including private, public and hybrid, and they’re looking to service providers to help lead the way. If you haven’t yet added cloud services to your portfolio, it’s time to get started.
Ellen Rubin is an experienced entrepreneur with a track record in leading strategy, market positioning and go-to-market efforts for fast-growing companies. She is the chief executive officer and co-founder of ClearSky Data, an early-stage company that is building a breakthrough solution in enterprise infrastructure. Most recently, she was co-founder of CloudSwitch, a cloud enablement software company that was acquired by Verizon in 2011.