Next gen Managed Services on AWS cloud

Cloud environments are becoming complex to design, implement and manage. To be able to harness the benefits of the public cloud, organisations need the relevant skills and experience to integrate, manage, and proactively monitor public cloud environments and applications while protecting their businesses from data loss, outages, and security risks. According to Gartner¹, by 2025, more than 80% of public cloud deals will require both hybrid cloud and multi-cloud capabilities, up from less than 50% in 2020. A public cloud is different from a private cloud in many aspects, and effectively managing these environments is now a top concern for many companies. To address this, companies often employ the services of Managed Services Providers (MSP) to manage their public cloud. MSPs work with the IT team to monitor and protect the public cloud environments.

With the private cloud’s build-and-operate model, businesses can have more "creative design" control over the hardware and software components used compared to other models. From the Microsoft, VMware and Openstack stacks, to the wide array of hardware components in servers, storage and networking, there are numerous choice permutations, coupled with equally numerous licensing, pricing and configuration options. The biggest benefit of such an approach is that you have the deepest level of control to ensure that your private cloud is built with very specific support for the applications that you expect to run on this cloud, including addressing data residency and sovereignty compliance requirements. The downside of such an approach is however, that you will have to be deeply involved in every technology choice across your entire private cloud platform. And more importantly, you need to have deep technical resources and expertise in-house to help you make the right decisions in picking the right hardware and software solutions.

In adopting the public cloud such as Microsoft Azure and Amazon Web Services (AWS), businesses depend heavily on the public cloud provider to design, build and continuously evolve or enhance their platforms as they deem fit. Computing resources are now presented to you as a utility service accessible through the public cloud providers’ portals/control panels or service application programming interfaces (APIs). You have little to no control over the hardware and software choices as these are largely dictated by the public cloud provider. Your applications architecture starts to adapt and morph towards leveraging the public cloud providers' service APIs, and a more concerted effort will be required to re-architect your applications to be more "cloud-native". The biggest benefit of adapting to public clouds is that you are now able to leverage the highly competitive and rapidly progressing software innovations coming from these global public cloud providers. With new cloud services and enhancements on existing ones emerging almost on a weekly basis, you can focus on improving your business applications or platforms to support your core businesses rather than spend precious resources and time on lower-level infrastructural concerns that your business stakeholders might never fully appreciate.

The private cloud’s build-and-operate model again lends itself to a higher level of control and predictability of the costs involved in the build-out, ongoing consumption and operation of such an infrastructure. While you will have more control over your spending, your choices of flexing that spend becomes drastically limited as the investment is generally committed upfront, which is further compounded by the looming future of ongoing costs to ensure your hardware and software components are up-to-date. If your applications landscape is generally stable with predictable usage patterns, there are definitely more favourable cost containment reasons to be more heavily invested in your own private cloud infrastructure, which can tolerate longer technology refresh cycles that will help minimise the long term capital and operating expenses.

In the world of public clouds, the promise of flexibility and rapid scaling up or down of cloud services is very real. However, this extreme flexibility comes with a spend management headache if one is not careful. Shadow IT and many different project teams in an enterprise can now utilise public clouds with the swipe of a credit card and very soon understanding and deciphering your public cloud spend can become a nightmare. This is very real and there are many companies today grappling with controlling their public cloud spend.

Singtel is no stranger to such requirements from private and public cloud environments. Drawing from extensive knowledge from managing cloud environments, we offer 3 pillars of capabilities as an AWS MSP – Cloud Management Platform (CMP), Professional Services (consulting, implementation, ongoing advice) and Managed Services.

CMP equips you with the ability to manage your AWS cloud service expense and have an overview of your cloud accounts, integrated with your identity management. At the same time, it enables the configuration of your managed cloud services. CMP includes ticketing system to manage your incidents. Incidents are logged via the CMP and the Operations Team attend to it swiftly as part of its Service Level Agreements.

Singtel’s Next Generation Managed Services (AWS) integrates CMP with AI Ops and ITSM tools for quick and timely support. With automation, we detect potential issues and resolve them, ensuring that your services are running smooth. Singtel’s Next Generation Managed Services utilises analytics to apply insights from intelligence gleaned from operations data, machine learning and AI. Event data are data-driven, eliminating waste.

At Singtel, we work hard so you can focus on what matters most - your business. Singtel Managed Services for Public Cloud (AWS) gives you a peace of mind to grow your business, while we manage your public cloud environments in the background.
 

¹Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Professional and Managed Services, Worldwide, 4 May 2020