“I just called to say that everything is great and we’ve have no issues to report.” As an MSP, this is not something you hear on a regular basis (or maybe ever). Instead, you’re contacted when the client is experiencing downtime, a security breach, a compliance audit or some other type of pressing matter. Here's a compilation of common complaints.

September 18, 2014

3 Min Read
4 Cloud Complaints MSPs Are Likely to Hear

By Michael Brown 1

“I just called to say that everything is great and we’ve have no issues to report.” As a managed service provider (MSP) and/or provider of cloud-based file sharing services, this may not something you hear on a regular basis (or maybe ever). Instead, you’re contacted when the client is experiencing downtime, a security breach, a compliance audit or some other type of pressing matter. You might also be contacted with a host of less urgent complaints, including those around pricing, lack of customer support, usability issues and so on. 

Of course, some are more frequent than others. So to help ensure that you are not caught off-guard, we wanted to highlight a few of the more common cloud complaints in today’s post.

“Where are all my files?”

Many B2B file sharing tools are not always as intuitive or usable as their consumer-facing counterparts. There is no doubt that these larger tools may take a bit more training that a typical application used to share family photos. As employees begin to use the applications, or new employees are hired, if there isn’t an emphasis on training confusion is likely to occur.

“The platform is down. When will it be back up?”

As an MSP, you know there is no such thing as “100 percent reliability” or “zero downtime.” Outages happen and there is almost nothing you can do about them except to wait or, as InfoWorld’s David Linthicum notes, complain:

Cloud workloads that put large demands on the server, storage, database, or network — hurting the performance of other workloads that share those resources — have been a problem both inside corporate data centers and, in particular, on SaaS and IaaS cloud platforms. When you own the servers you at least have some control over the situation. If others control the servers — the case in the cloud — all you can do is to complain to them.

“Why is my bill so high?”

The pricing models of various cloud platforms are anything but transparent. Joe McKendrick of Forbes:

Pricing is one of the greatest sources of discontent with cloud services — not necessarily because they are too high, but because pricing models are too confusing. Vendors’ innovative pricing models often end up looking like the exotic financial instruments created by financial services firms.

These confusing pricing models can lead to client’s assuming that they are being billed for services they don’t want or need. Even if the particular cloud vendor has a maze of a pricing scheme, special care should be taken to walk the client through every aspect of it.

“Why won’t this work with my other applications?”

The simple fact of the matter is, sometimes cloud applications don’t work with others very well. However companies carefully choose their vendors and applications for a variety of reasons such as security, cost and dependability. Of course they may still wish that they could integrate with their personal cloud applications, and even worse simply not understand why it is not possible.

Of course these complaints are much better to receive than the “all of my data was just stolen…” ones; however their frequency can be taxing. Approaching the integration with these issues in mind will help guide the training and onboarding process in a way that will hopefully minimalize these common cloud complaints.

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