How Can MSPs Help Their Customers with Public Cloud Adoption?

Many organizations lack advanced visibility, monitoring and infrastructure control in their public cloud environments, according to a new ScienceLogic survey of over 1,600 IT professionals. 

The survey, titled “Trends in Global Cloud Adoption,” revealed 82 percent of respondents were unable to ensure optimum performance, health and availability of public cloud workloads due to lack of advanced visibility into their public cloud infrastructure.

Forty-six percent also noted that they do not, or do not know how, to proactively monitor their public cloud workloads.

“These results illustrate that cloud adoption isn’t just a technology fad,” said ScienceLogic CEO Dave Link in a prepared statement. “As hybrid IT and multi-cloud usage becomes mainstream for organizations, so does the need to simplify workload visibility and management for IT teams.”

Other survey results included:

• Over 75 percent of respondents said shadow IT and cloud sprawl is happening within their organizations.
• 65 percent said they feel that IT has less control over the infrastructure in their public cloud environments.
• Organizations lose an average of about $3.9 million, or about $12,200 per minute, annually due to network outages.
• 50 percent of organizations said they have experienced at least one complete network outage in the past 12 months. Of those, 27 percent noted that they have experienced over two hours of downtime per event.
• Network failures are the source of the majority of reported outages, with 26 percent citing network device failures, 24 percent citing circuit failures and 18 percent citing network configuration errors.

In addition, a recent study from Seattle-based data center operator Digital Fortress showed the majority of IT decision-makers in large and mid-sized U.S. companies said they want to outsource their public cloud management to managed service providers (MSPs). 

The study revealed 70 percent of respondents pointed out that they preferred to deal with a single vendor to manage their entire IT infrastructure.

How can MSPs help customers reap the benefits of the public cloud?

Gary Quinn, CEO of data protection and storage virtualization solutions provider FalconStor, told MSPmentor he believes ensuring customers are using the “right cloud at the right time” is essential for MSPs. 

“You need to look at the different types of ‘enterprises’ and what they are using the public cloud for within their IT workloads,” he said. 

Educating customers about the public cloud also enables MSPs to ensure their customers can optimize their cloud usage.

“Applications such as email, customer contact systems, sales productivity tools [and] financial systems all have a place in public cloud environments,” Quinn said. “[But] the use of the public cloud for “custom applications” and high-volume transaction applications are most likely not the place where the public cloud would be used.”

What are your thoughts on the ScienceLogic survey? Share your thoughts about this story in the Comments section below, via Twitter @dkobialka or email me at dan.kobialka@penton.com.