According to the “Flexera 2021 State of the Cloud Report,” “92 percent of enterprises have a multi-cloud strategy; 80 percent have a hybrid cloud strategy.” Cloud adoption among organizations has increased over the last 10 years; however, many are finding that cloud isn’t as simple to use as it was originally believed. Once they’re in the cloud, organizations are face many questions: How do we manage rising costs? Does storing data in the cloud makes sense, and should it be hot or cold? How and when do we access data on-prem or through applications in the cloud? Do we use one cloud provider or multiple? Luckily, there is help available for your journey to and then working in the cloud.

MSPs typically help your organization by assessing your business goals and developing solution to meet them. But an MSP can provide additional benefits beyond resolving your cloud issues. An MSP can be an enhancement to your technical team, as they often bring cloud certifications in security, architecture development and technical troubleshooting, which may not be common on your team. An MSP will use cloud native or multicloud tools to provide a best practices approach to cloud infrastructure management. Cloud tool selection and execution is based on customer requirements (such as IaaS or PaaS) and years of experience capturing management best practices.

In addition, an MSP can add DevOps and automation tools that leverage infrastructure as code, which enables expansion and management at scale.

Partnering with an MSP allows your organization to focus on its core competencies and strategic objectives while the MSP handles the day-to-day of your cloud infrastructure.

MSPs are expected to deliver three pillars of capabilities: cloud management platform (CMP), professional services and managed services.

Each of these pillars delivers a different capability. 

1. CMP:
   This is a suite of tools that provides insights into the cloud environment and allows you to make operational decisions based on data and trends. Typically these tools are self-help and allow you access to better understand cost management, create a new virtual machine or create technical ticket via a service portal.
   
   
2. Professional Services:
   These start with taking a consultative approach and designing a cloud environment that adapts to today’s organizational challenges. No more lift-and-shift but true migration into the cloud in a way that addresses governance, identity, disaster recovery (DR) and backup. Professional services are not meant to be one-time interactions but should be delivering ongoing advice.
   
   
3. Managed Services:
   This is where the MSP provides monitoring and analytics of your cloud environment. The MSP may make suggestions on how to manage costs and optimize resources or offer ways to improve governance, security and compliance. It is so much more than providing reactive technical support. The MSP is proactively managing your environment and provides recommendations as your organization evolves to met new demands.

CDW starts by engaging with you and listening to determine your needs. We then design and implement a customized cloud solution. CDW is an Azure Expert MSP and an AWS MSP. We are currently pursuing our GCP MSP certification as well. CDW takes the complexity out of the cloud and provides your organization with a seamless cloud experience. We are here to drive innovative business solutions to support your digital transformation so you are operating in a high performance, agile environment.