Managed services providers: Unsung IT heroes in a crisis

Many companies that buy into the idea of a multi-cloud environment for flexibility, scalability and cost-savings are also discovering the challenges in maintaining application continuity, compliance, and security across dispersed cloud endpoints.

The ability to address these issues is key to successful multi-cloud deployment even during normal times, but it becomes especially crucial during a crisis like the current COVID-19 situation, where the cloud has emerged as the main enabler for business continuity, notably for what Bloomberg calls the “world’s largest work-from-home experiment¹”.

Thanks to the cloud, web-based apps, virtual desktops, collaboration tools, virtual private networks (VPN), endpoint encryption and a host of other capabilities make it possible for teams to work remotely from nearly any device. Also, thanks to public clouds like Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, these services have been able scale to meet the extreme surge in demand as cities across the globe go into lockdown.

But being able to make seamless use of public cloud services and to manage a multi-cloud environment is no stroll in the park.

Keeping up with what is running and where can be difficult when the environment keeps changing. Businesses will need to know, for example, exactly where their data resides in order to comply with data jurisdiction requirements. They will also need to monitor and manage their workloads across the distributed environment for performance, availability and optimisation. More often than not, this will involve the use of multiple tools to manage the different cloud vendors’ infrastructures.

The more cloud services the enterprise leverages across a multi-cloud environment, the more sets of skills it will have to develop, and the greater the vendor management overheads. Many enterprises will not have the resources to take this on effectively in-house.

This is where managed cloud service providers (MCSPs) are helping behind the scenes, making sure that companies are able to optimise their use of the cloud especially in times of crisis.

MCSPs provide outsourced services for managing cloud-based services. They plug the skills gap and support organisations in managing cloud security, computing, storage, network operations, application stacks, vendors and other aspects of their multi-cloud deployment, making sure that resources can be scaled rapidly across multiple clouds at any time.

With time-to-offering especially critical during this period when services may be required in a hurry, MCSPs also provide the technical support to help businesses automate and enhance their operations. They have the expertise to integrate new cloud services into a business’s existing infrastructure and help the enterprise to take advantage of specific cloud services to achieve specific business goals.  When vendor-specific service issues arise, they can interface with the third-party vendors to resolve them.

On a regular basis, MCSPs help businesses to improve their cloud economics and optimise cloud spend by managing the lifecycle of cloud services across the multi-cloud environment. For example, while businesses can save costs by using the public cloud for highly variable workloads in distributed locations, there are scenarios where these benefits may not materialise, for example, when running static workloads with predictable infrastructure needs.

Or if a business is using active cloud storage resources for data that has not been accessed in a while, it will make economic sense to move it to cheaper cold storage. This applies when, for example, the data has to be stored for compliance reasons, but the business may not have a need to interact with it regularly.

MCSPs can help to monitor these different use cases and cost components, and shift data or usage patterns to ensure that businesses only pay for the resources that they use and use each of these resources to its fullest.

From a security perspective, the use of multiple clouds can expand the potential attack surface of the enterprise, especially if there is any misconfiguration due to human error or a lack of requisite cloud skills.

With the cloud as their core competency, MCSPs can help address this by taking a holistic approach to ensure that enterprises are able to utilise the agility and flexibility of a multi-cloud architecture without compromising security. They bring with them knowledge and expertise to operate a cloud environment with security in mind and can help identify or correlate threats across multiple cloud platforms.

This will be an ongoing process as infrastructure and software change over time, requiring regular monitoring of the threat landscape and ensuring that security functions are able to communicate and coordinate between themselves wherever they have been deployed in the distributed cloud environment.

The COVID-19 pandemic has put the spotlight on the cloud and its role in business continuity and disaster recovery situations. Behind the scenes, the MCSPs are the unsung IT heroes, managing multi-cloud environments to make sure they can respond to extreme demands under stress conditions, and helping businesses to leverage the cloud and to deliver the services needed to support an increasingly distributed workforce.

Speak to us to discover how MCSPs can help you navigate the new normal.

¹ Coronavirus Forces World’s Largest Work-From-Home Experiment, Bloomberg, February 2020