Why Cloud Managed Services Are Becoming a Must-Have

When organizations first began moving resources into the public cloud, they did so hoping to quickly take advantage of the numerous benefits that cloud has to offer. One of those benefits is the ability to scale quickly, to both expand and reduce consumption without the intensive effort that goes into building and maintaining on-premises physical infrastructure. 

Organizations quickly learned that while this simplicity can be highly beneficial, their new environment, if improperly managed, can become costly and performance can suffer. These issues become even more pronounced as organizations begin to place resources on multiple public cloud platforms. 

According to one recent survey, almost half of organizations have multiple public cloud environments today, and a full two-thirds either use or plan to use a managed service provider (MSP) like CDW to help them optimize their environment.

Cost management is a key component to properly initiating and maintaining any organization’s cloud estate. While it seems simple enough, there are several disciplines that must be followed and a strategy that must be built and maintained, unique to users’ day-to-day requirements.

Many organizations struggle to accurately track their cloud spending across multiple platforms, a key element for optimization. One cause of this, ironically, is the ease with which cloud assets can be initiated. The cloud’s purpose-built simplicity allows anyone with access to spin up new cloud resources with just a few mouse clicks. These rogue resources may or may not be sized correctly, may be assigned too much or too little processing capability and may stop being used by the business group that initiated them. 

CDW’s managed service customers gain a precise, holistic view of their current cloud footprint across all the platforms they actively use. Armed with actual data, IT and business leaders can make informed decisions about which cloud assets are needed, which should be removed and which should be optimized. Only then can CDW and our customers work out a strategic governance plan, providing patterns and practices to ensure efficient and effective cloud use going forward.

Organizations learn quickly that not all applications are good candidates for migration to the public cloud. These legacy applications typically remain on-premises because of their monolithic nature, the number of dependent applications required for them to work or their fragility. Many organizations are working hard, either internally or with trusted partners like CDW, to modernize these applications, working to create an agile development process that decouples technology components to improve scalability, portability and speed of deployment.

While modernization is a separate engagement from managed services, MSPs like CDW offer technical account managers as a component with select managed service tiers. In addition to acting as the customer’s  technical point of contact, TAMs can help identify opportunities for modernization and guide the customer’s overall digital strategies.

As more resources are moved into multiple cloud environments, security vulnerabilities increase. Organizations often struggle with data security because they lack a comprehensive picture of their digital landscape. Here, too, an MSP like CDW can help an organization assess its security posture, evaluating its cloud environment with an eye to compliance requirements and ever-evolving cyberthreats.

IT professionals with in-depth, multicloud expertise are difficult to find, and organizations may struggle to hire this level of talent. Often, the most economical and effective answer is to partner with a systems integrator like CDW, who has earned multiple MSP certifications with the largest public cloud providers and has decades of experience with legacy systems and applications. CDW believes cloud is the future and is investing in our cloud managed services, offering more capabilities and providing organizations with access to certified multicloud expertise to help them navigate their cloud challenges. 

Story by Andy Dennen and Denise Nickels