Five Technologies and Trends MSPs Should Embrace

How can you make the most of your managed services business? One way is to leverage the best technologies and trends. Here’s a list of five technologies and practices to embrace to keep your MSP business lean and mean.

Delivering excellent service to your customers — and keeping your operations trim — requires constant innovation and adaption to take advantage of the best technologies available. Today, those technologies include:

• Containers. In many scenarios, containers offer a more efficient way to host applications than virtual machines. They are also more portable in many respects. Consider migrating your workloads to containers in order to keep operations efficient and agile.
• Infrastructure-as-Code (IoC). Traditionally, provisioning and configuring servers and workstations required a large amount of tedious, manual effort. The IoC trend is changing that. With IoC, you use simple text files to define how your infrastructure should be set up, then use a tool like Chef or Puppet to implement the plans automatically.
• Serverless computing. Using serverless computing services, you can deploy resource-intensive code in the cloud in a cost-efficient way. Serverless computing may be just what you need to cut your hosting costs and improve performance if you have workloads that fit well into the serverless model.
• Open source. Software solutions based on open source code offer a number of advantages to MSPs. Open source is no longer a new idea, so you may be using it already. If you’re not, however, you’re behind the curve. Open source is now widely used in the enterprise — and, probably, by your customers.
• Data analytics. Big data and data analytics are also no longer a new concept. They have been mainstream for several years now. What has changed more recently, however, is the emergence of platforms that make it easier than ever to leverage big data technologies without having to be an expert yourself in big data. If you want to take advantage of data analytics, consider the cloud-based analytics services offered by hosts like AWS and Azure.