4 Common Cloud Problems and How MSPs Can Solve Them

By Michael Brown 1

Managed service providers are ideally positioned to help end-customer companies with cloud services, including cloud-based file sharing decisions, configuration and management. Here are four other ways that MSPs can help customers with their cloud efforts.

Phil Turner, EMEA VP at Okta says that even IT leaders will admit they don’t know everything there is to know about cloud infrastructures. Even pay-per-use cloud models aren’t as straightforward as people would like to think.

Luckily, this is where MSPs can step in to make the cloud experience less of a headache for customers and much more enjoyable for users. Here are four common problems companies encounter with the cloud, and how MSPs can make cloud decisions, migration, and orchestration a lot less stressful.

1.      It’s not as straightforward as it looks.

Misunderstanding licensing agreements often leads to administration problems. And administration problems often lead to frustrated providers, employers, and employees, resulting in an inefficient working environment.

Stefan Haase, product director at cloud provider Redcentric says, “You only need to look at the differences between enterprise and service provider license agreements… to see how confusing it is for customers.”

Experienced MSPs can read the small print for customers and ensure everyone has the right expectations and a solid understanding of how to scale, migrate, and mitigate the cloud into your work environment. MSPs can help customers get it right the first time save customers a lot of money and effort in the long run.

2.      Proprietary systems versus open systems?

Deciding between a proprietary cloud system compared to an open one is usually a struggle for corporate decision makers. Companies want to save money using an open system, but they occasionally cause unexpected budget expenditures. Open platforms usually require a lot of development efforts and security decisions. 

MSPs can help ensure that customers chose the infrastructure that best fits its needs. MSPs can help customers get the best out of a proprietary service. MSP’s can also help workout unforeseen kinks in security and development with an open system.

3.      Orchestration

As Turner at Okta says, the cloud often “lacks the liquidity to give you a perfect internal market for your computing resources.”

In other words, there is not always a seamless transition (in terms of capacity, memory, storage and networking) from in-house applications to the cloud. Typically, clouds are structured around scale and elasticity but use cheaper commodity components.

MSPs will work around compatibility issues to keep cloud applications up and running, whether it means a complete restructuring of your applications to make them cloud ready or just a bit of rewriting.

4.      Migration

There are many questions when it comes to configuring data to the cloud:

How might your customers integrate a hybrid cloud structure into their current environments? How might one cloud provider communicate with another? Is it better to start from scratch or reengineer a service all together?

Ash Patel, Insight UK’s head of cloud for EMEA notes that the cloud by itself is easy to use, “but most businesses don’t stop at one service.”

Predicting possible roadblocks, questions, and outcomes when adopting the cloud into your company environment is important for deploying and getting the most out of your cloud service. MSPs can help you with all of that while reducing risk of failure, cost, and time.

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What other problems could arise with the cloud? And how might MSPs be able to solve them? Leave a comment in the section below.