3 key ways an MSP can help businesses reduce cloud complexity

Cloud adoption is most certainly on the rise, with recent statistics showing that the average company is using 110 different cloud applications in 2021, up from 80 the previous year. Countries like Singapore are taking the lead in this development - research revealed that seven in 10 Singapore-based IT decision makers said that technologies like hybrid cloud were pivotal to their post-COVID-19 recovery and business continuity.  

However, adopting advanced cloud technologies like hybrid cloud and multi-cloud results in increased workloads along with more pressure on IT teams. According to a report from Deloitte, over half of medium-to-large sized enterprises are finding cloud much more complex than they’d expected.1 Companies investing in cloud will need to have a corresponding strategy to cope with the complexity these approaches bring. In this article, we will discuss the burdens that cloud complexity can put on a business as well the ways businesses can tackle the challenges with a qualified cloud Partner. 

Why should companies pay attention to cloud complexity? 

Despite the many obvious benefits of incorporating cloud into work processes, the constant adding and changing of applications quickly becomes both time and resource consuming, making company leadership question the value of these applications. These effects can include:

• Ballooning cloud costs: the trend of pay-as-you-go cloud billing makes it harder to control spending as it scales with business growth. 
• Rapid evolution of the cloud: Dramatic growth of the public cloud has birthed new cloud technologies and strategies that did not exist before. For instance, DevOps principle, serverless architecture and container technology  join the mainstream in just a few years. 
• Overstretched manpower: IT staff end up spending most of their time filtering alerts, greatly impacting team efficiency. Meanwhile, too much work gets passed to CloudOps teams to run the different technology stacks, cloud platforms, and applications.
• Higher threat vulnerability: increased complexity means more vulnerability when there are too many platforms, databases, and cloud services needing security updates, which end up getting missed. 

How can an MSP help businesses reduce cloud complexity?

No company is an island when it comes to facing cloud complexity, which is why engaging a cloud partner/managed service provider(MSP) to guide and support business throughout the process is the best way to go. A cloud partner/MSP can offer a complete package of  services to allow your IT and CloudOps departments to focus on the core activities relevant to your business. The following are the top 3 benefits a cloud partner/MSP can provide: 

1. Evaluate existing resources to implement best practices

A qualified cloud partner/MSP offers various services to help businesses choose the best-suited cloud services, from consulting, architecture design, migration, operations to cloud cost management. 

We help businesses across different industries and pillars assess and design their cloud architecture to ensure readiness, implement best practices, and enable every aspect of the migration process from VMs, applications to data migration.

2. Manage your data growth and ensure data security 

As businesses scale, not only is there more data, but also there are more data sources. With CloudMile Datalab Solution, businesses easily open up the possibility of integration with various technologies and drive insights from a bunch of data. 

At the centre of the solution is an advanced Data Warehouse BigQuery. Before data landed in the Data warehouse, CloudMile data experts can help to perform an ETL process such as  data ingestion, extract, transform and load data. Once data lands in the Data warehouse, it opens up to multiple possible ways to bring added value to your business. For example, businesses can gain additional insights on the existing data via business intelligence tools, accelerate integration with AI/ML and also embrace API monetization to generate additional revenue from their data. CloudMile also collaborates with best-in-class partners like Google Cloud, Fivetran, Twilio and more, creating a partner ecosystem to provide customised and comprehensive support. 

3. Streamline and optimise cloud/cost operations

As the size and complexity of your businesses grows, so will the number of cloud services and APIs your business is using. Keeping track of these tools and using them effectively will be essential to overcoming cloud complexity and ensuring smooth operations.

The burden of accomplishing the above is simply too high for any in-house IT or CloudOps team to handle alone. That’s why having a good cloud partner/MSP to work as your external support team is beneficial in making sure that all cloud services and APIs are being optimised and not creating additional labour for your staff. 

CloudMile offers our clients agile project management as well as the option of 24x7x365 support from our fully certified cloud experts. This means that you have an always-on team to keep track of the alert, respond to issues and make sure platform downtime is minimal in the event of incidents. Additionally, CloudMile’s Billing-as-a-Service feature offers annual infrastructure review to cost optimisation, helping businesses to manage their IT budgets more efficiently. 

CloudMile’s Cloud Management Platform MileLync also serves as a hub for the easy monitoring of cloud spending, taking this burden off of in-house staff. Using a data platform to help your teams determine what percentage of utilisation is efficient can simplify your management strategy, provide better visualisation on the cloud spending/status. 

Accelerate you digital transformation with CloudMile 

CloudMile can offer all of the above support and more to businesses throughout Southeast Asia that wish to decrease cloud complexity to get the best returns from their cloud investment.