The Future of Cloud Based Applications

I think MSPs have a legitimate role to play in addressing both questions.

Migrating Legacy Applications to the Cloud

There are MSPs out there who have application development experience and can handle cloud application migration projects. While I wouldn't say these MSPs are common, they do exist.

Cloud application adoption clearly depends on customers (and application vendors) making the investment in pushing certain applications to the cloud. Just ask vendors like Intuit and they will likely tell you it is not as easy as it looks. However, once the investment has been made, it often provides many benefits.

The point is MSPs can play a role in migrating these applications to run in the cloud. The migration, however, is only half the battle and not the end goal. The end goal of any cloud application migration should be the ongoing management.

Managing Cloud Applications

Smart MSPs involve themselves in short term projects in order to gain long term managed services relationships. The same is true for applications. Regardless of how an application gets to the cloud, someone will need to manage that application.

Now, if you were a fly on the wall of some of these public cloud companies, you would likely hear them say that they would like to be the ones to manage cloud applications, especially if it is in their cloud. Recent moves by Amazon to being offering managed services to their enterprise customers supports this premise.

MSPs, therefore, need to be aware of these trends and stake their claim in the ground as it relates to managing cloud applications. If they don't, someone else most definitely will.