Demand for Public Cloud Services is Growing. Here’s How to Make the Most of it

See how partnering with an MSP for public cloud management can improve efficiencies and deliver the skills you need to drive innovation.

Demand for public cloud has been growing strong lately as customers take advantage of an exciting new era – one of rapid delivery of computing, storage and network services. These services can help to deliver agility, scalability and uptime like never before.

Cloud in itself, however, is merely the model for service delivery. It won’t automatically provide a path to efficiency, data protection or innovation.

One of cloud’s greatest strengths can also be its biggest weaknesses; the rapid provisioning capability of cloud can lead to sprawl, cost overruns and unsecured data stores.

In this blog we look at how cloud still requires management by skilled people to unlock the full business benefits.

The cloud management imperative

There are many compelling reasons for IT and business leaders to focus on managing cloud services.

Managed public cloud services offer a number of advantages, including:

• Security. Data needs to be secured and protected, even if it’s in the cloud. Spinning up new services in public clouds can quickly lead to multiple vulnerabilities.
• Automation. Clouds offer varying levels of automation, but a managed cloud provider can exploit this capability to improve workflows and business processes.
• Monitoring. Any cloud service can experience problems. For the customer this might be unavoidable at times, but with good monitoring you can diagnose problems much sooner and minimise any fallout.
• Disaster recovery. While they’re generally reliable, public clouds can – and do – experience outages. Managed cloud providers allow you to build a highly reliable DR architecture that isn’t dependent on any one cloud.
• Optimisation. Uncontrolled costs are a common problem with cloud. With the right management partner, services will be optimised for the application and costs won’t spiral out of control. It’s also important to optimise the type of cloud service for the workload. For example, some workloads are more CPU or storage intensive than others.

Public clouds provide a useful platform for IT service delivery, but it’s really up to management to get the most out of cloud.

Keeping up with cloud skills

The cloud industry is continuously developing new methods to deploy infrastructure on demand, and a good managed cloud provider will keep up with the evolving skills required.

Improving cloud capability depends on having the skills directly relevant to the type of cloud service, as different clouds have different ways of doing things.

The range of public cloud skills spans traditional IT, including computing, storage and network skills, but also includes emerging skills for cloud-native technologies.

These cloud native technologies can include containers, infrastructure automation and modernisation of legacy applications.

For example, a traditional database workload can be migrated to the cloud “as is”, or a cloud-native, database-as-a-service product can be used as a functional replacement which eliminates the need to manually run a database.

Getting the balance right

Public cloud management involves the deployment and management life cycle of resources and the reduction of services in response to business demands. Getting this balance right will usually involve a combination of manual work and infrastructure automation.

It’s crucially important for organisations to have some management capability, and the MSP delivery model works very effectively for public cloud management. Public cloud managed service providers combine consulting expertise of cloud architecture with operational system storage and network management for the long-term security of your data.

With the right public cloud management service your organisation can rapidly and securely deploy new workloads in the cloud, to build new products and services and transform the business.