The managed service marketplace continues to change rapidly. The majority of service providers address the needs of small and mid-size companies who struggle to afford or find the necessary IT skills to support new technologies. Virtualization, cloud services and the demands of an increasingly mobile workforce, for example, place significant demands on already stretched SMB IT resources.
Service providers help by offloading the day-to-day monitoring and management of existing infrastructures, but as customers seek to adopt these new capabilities, managed services offerings must adapt too. Over time, revenues from traditional monitoring services are likely to decline as customers migrate applications hosted in-house to those hosted on cloud services. Offering higher value advanced services not only helps to overcome the potential revenue loss, it also helps MSPs differentiate and grow their businesses more profitably by providing greater customer value.
Apart from greater marketplace differentiation, the benefits of delivering higher value services include bigger and more profitable deals as well as greater customer satisfaction.
Advanced services require the ability to deploy a proactive service level monitoring system that monitors all aspects of a customer’s hybrid cloud environment, including the core internal network infrastructure, virtualized servers, storage, and both internal and cloud-based applications and resources. Predictive monitoring services help ensure uptime and higher service levels via proactive and reliable notification of potential issues. Advanced remedial actions should include support not only for rapid response when the circumstances warrant, but also for regular customer reviews to discuss longer term configuration changes, additional resource requirements (e.g. storage), policy changes and so on, based on predictive SLA compliance trend reports.
Beyond advanced monitoring, professional skill sets are also very important, particularly when it comes to managing new cloud-based applications services. The ability to scale to support larger customers requires tools that simplify the complexity of potential issues and reduce the mean time to resolution. Without the right tools, complex issues require the skills of several experts – server, database, network, application etc. – thus making it difficult for businesses to scale as the infrastructure and the business grows. Tools that can quickly identify root causes across network and application layers are vital.
Cloud customers are increasingly reliant on their managed service providers to “fix” problems with their cloud services, whether it be performance issues, printing issues, integration issues, etc. Getting a rapid response from cloud service providers who have “thousands of other customers who are working just fine” is hard to do, especially as they know problems are more likely caused by customer infrastructure issues than by theirs. When addressing these issues, savvy MSPs use learning tools to capture and share experiences internally in order to turn them into repeatable processes and valuable services for other customers.
