A managed service provider operates your cloud environment. This means they provide all the services, including (but not limited to) monitoring, maintenance, troubleshooting and security assurance to ensure that your cloud delivers the performance and power you need.
The services are recurring, and take place every month over a predetermined period of time, such as one year. Therefore, the service provider bills for its managed service effort in a monthly invoice. You define the exact scope of the services to be provided by the managed service provider in the service level agreements (SLAs).
"Managed Services" is a term used in many ways in the IT industry. A managed service provider for your public cloud environment, which is operated at one of the leading hyperscalers such as Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure or Google Cloud, is characterised by a high degree of automation.
Due to the technologically advanced operation in the cloud, a large number of operations can be automated. These include monitoring or fault reporting and correction. Minor faults are solved fully automatically by the system and thus do not cause any downtime.
Benefits of using a cloud-based managed service provider
Many IT strategies currently specify the migration of applications, data and processes to the cloud. These are extensive and long-term projects that bundle a large number of resources. During the preparations and planning of your cloud migration, two important points already emerge that can influence the subsequent operation:
- Your own resources: How well positioned is your IT team in the cloud? This depends primarily on the number of people, but also on their field of activity and expertise. If a colleague is responsible for some of the migration processes in addition to his or her core activities, he or she will not have the capacity to operate the set-up processes afterwards. This is because operation is a permanent and time-intensive.
- The attention required: Which IT processes and business operations are executed in the cloud environment? If these are customer environments used around the clock or across different time zones, your cloud environment requires the highest form of attention: 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
The key questions you need to ask yourself here: Do I have the necessary resources internally to be able to operate the cloud environment independently? What is the right cloud strategy?
A managed service provider for your cloud environment fills the gaps through expert consultation, know-how and automated processes. Thus, your employees can concentrate 100% on more important, value-adding tasks and you can have peace of mind; the worry-free operation of the cloud environment is guaranteed.
Interested in learning more about managed services in the cloud? We recommend starting with our whitepaper on the topic, which provides you with all the fundamental information about managed services.
Download Managed Services Whitepaper
(PDF, 5mb)