Guide to Cloud Managed Services for Businesses 

Cloud computing has become increasingly popular as businesses and organizations seek its benefits, such as enhanced data security, flexibility, and easy scalability. To fully leverage these advantages without the associated hassles, many companies are now turning to business cloud managed IT services. 

According to a Global Forecast report by MarketsandMarkets Research, the market for cloud-managed services is expected to grow significantly, reaching USD 139.4 billion by 2026, up from USD 86.1 billion in 2021. 

This trend highlights the importance of managed service providers in helping businesses optimize their cloud operations. Continue reading to learn what you can also gain from these partnerships. 

What are Cloud Managed Services? 

Cloud-managed services involve partnering with a provider offering comprehensive cloud infrastructure support when a business wants to migrate to the cloud. This includes setting up, maintaining, updating, and troubleshooting your cloud environment. Unlike basic cloud infrastructure providers, managed service providers (MCSPs) offer ongoing management and support beyond the initial setup, covering services like cloud storage, cloud transformation, and cloud-native development. 

When and Why Do Businesses Need Them? 

Businesses need cloud-managed services to manage the complexities of cloud infrastructure effectively. Managing cloud environments requires continuous monitoring, regular updates, and quick troubleshooting, which can be challenging and resource-intensive for internal teams. 

Opting for cloud-managed services helps businesses avoid the difficulties of in-house cloud management, such as unplanned expenses, the need for additional hires, and technical debt. For instance, Symphony Solutions can develop and manage a comprehensive cloud solution, ensuring efficient communication within the cloud infrastructure. 

By choosing cloud-managed services, businesses can depend on these expert providers to maintain and optimize their cloud environments. This ensures that the cloud infrastructure remains secure, up-to-date, and efficient, allowing businesses to concentrate on their core operations and strategic objectives. 

Benefits of working with a managed cloud services provider (MCSP) 

1. Predictable spending. Cloud service providers usually offer a subscription plan that may be tailored to your organizational IT needs for the best service-to-price ratio. You may scale your managed cloud team at any time as the need arises. Sometimes, your provider may offer you a credit plan for when your cloud needs change throughout the year. However, this is more applicable to organizations that experience an excessively heavy load at certain times of the year (e.g., Black Friday and Christmas).  
2. Resource optimization. Your MCSP will provide services that best suit your workloads and planned budget and optimize performance for desired business value outcomes. A good MCSP will keep you clear with regular performance metrics reports, help you configure your managed cloud infrastructure, and constantly improve your solution.  
3. Robust infrastructure. As part of cloud infrastructure managed services, your MCSP sets up your cloud infrastructure. The service provider helps align your cloud network operations to your business needs, regularly updates and monitors the state of your cloud environment and reports back to you.  
4. Maintenance. By opting for maintenance with your cloud services provider, you have more options for saving costs on IT expenses. Your MCSP alleviates the technical and financial burden of maintaining your own cloud environment. 
5. Service level agreements. When you start working with an MCSP, your provider commits to delivering the agreed-upon service levels and ensuring service continuity for your business.  
6. Quick response time. You can expect 24/7 cloud support and a quick response to any issues with your cloud infrastructure, thus ensuring that your managed cloud applications operate uninterrupted.  
7. Data safety and recovery. Data loss is a security risk you want to avoid at all costs. With cloud-based managed services, you get regular data backups, quick recovery, and data source reservations.  
8. Interfacing. Your MCSP handles any issue related to your cloud vendor so that you can focus on your business growth. As certified partners with AWS and GCP, we can ensure the fastest problem resolution, cost control, and automation of critical processes.  
9. Timely updates. Your MCSP maintains its software and hardware always up to standard, with regular upgrades, personnel training and upskilling, expanding resources, and keeping up with the pace of the cloud market and industry.  
10. Integrated services. Create your custom cloud environment seamlessly connected to your existing systems. With an MCSP you can be flexible in what cloud solution exactly matches your business objectives, allowing yourself more freedom in prioritizing spending and focusing on growth.  

Benefits of working with a managed cloud services provider 

When you opt to work with an MSP, you can benefit from having access to a reliable team of cloud experts that handle your cloud environment and help optimize your business operations. Here are just some of the perks of your provider’s team managing cloud infrastructure for your business: 

• Predictable spending. Your managed services provider usually offers a subscription plan that may be tailored to your organizational IT needs for the best service to price ratio. You may scale your managed cloud team at any time as the need arises. In some cases, your provider may offer you a credit plan for when your cloud needs change throughout the year. However, this is more applicable to organizations that experience an excessively heavy load at certain times in the year (e.g., Black Friday, Christmas). 

• Resource optimization. Your MSP will set you up with services that fit you best in terms of workloads and planned budget, as well as optimize performance for desired business value outcomes. A good managed services provider will keep you in the clear with regular performance metrics reports and help you configure your managed cloud infrastructure and constantly improve your solution. 

• Robust infrastructure. As a part of cloud infrastructure managed services your MCSP sets up your cloud infrastructure The service provider helps align your cloud network operations to your business needs, regularly updates and monitors the state of your cloud environment, and reports back to you. 

• Maintenance. Opting for maintenance with your cloud services provider, you have more options for saving costs on IT expenses. Your MCSP alleviates you from the burden, technical and financial, of having to maintain your own cloud environment.

• Service level agreements. When you start working with an MCSP, your provider commits to delivering the agreed-upon levels of service and ensuring service continuity for your business. 

• Quick response time. You can expect 24/7 cloud support and a quick response to any occurring issues with your cloud infrastructure, thus ensuring that your managed cloud applications operate uninterrupted. 

• Data safety and recovery. Data loss is the security risk that you want to avoid at all costs. With cloud-based managed services, you get first of all regular data backups and quick recovery, but also data sources reservation. 

• Interfacing. Any issue relating to your cloud vendor is handled by your MCSP, so that you can only focus on your business growth. Being certified partners with AWS and GCP, we can ensure the fastest problem resolution, cost control and automation of any critical processes. 

• Timely updates. Your MCSP maintains their software and hardware always up to standard, with regular upgrades, personnel training and upskilling, expanding resources and keeping up with the stride of the cloud market and industry. 

• Integrated services. Create your custom cloud environment seamlessly connected to your existing systems. With an MSP you can be flexible in what cloud solution exactly matches your business objectives, allowing yourself more freedom in how to prioritize spending and focus on growth. 

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Managed cloud services provider vs. Cloud services provider 

Cloud service providers offer the tools to create and manage your cloud ecosystem, depending on the individual solution you require. Cloud service providers, such as AWS, Google, and Azure, offer different types of cloud computing for your business needs and support your solution. When you work with an MCSP, you can make use of the actual value of your cloud solution with a long-term perspective.  

Your managed cloud services provider offers a higher level of IT support, your MCSP will see to it that all your cloud-related needs are met and you are getting the best service for your money. Your managed cloud provider is going to stay with you for a while, so you should want to know what to expect from this cooperation long-term.  

Managed cloud services: What to expect  

When you secure yourself a reliable MCSP, you can request any of the following from their range of services:  

• Proactive communication and 24/7 cloud support  
• System administration and operations  
• System monitoring, alerting, and reporting  
• Single point of contact for client-facing support  
• Backup and disaster recovery  
• Database administration  
• Developer support and training  
• Knowledge database for application for faster issue-solving  
• Fast issue solving  
• SLA management  

This is the baseline of what to expect when choosing to go with managed IT cloud services.  

What to consider when choosing your Cloud Managed Services Provider  

Are you ready to start your cloud journey with an MCSP? Here are some tips on how to make sure that you find the right match.  

• Expertise and certification. When setting up your in-house team, you look for people with the right experience and expertise. It’s the same with cloud service providers, maybe even more so if, with your own team, you may put in buffer time for training and skilling up. With an MCSP, you want to get the solution out of the box. You rely on your provider with every step of the process, leaving little leeway for bad takes. Look for a certified MCSP with solid proof of expertise and credibility, as you want your cloud environment to be managed by a tech team with proper training and experience.  

• Tooling and workflows. You want to trust your managed IT cloud services provider that they have the right tools and workflows instated to give you the cloud solution that is the right fit. However, you can also have a say in what and how they do it when choosing your provider. You want a provider that is familiar with the prevalent tooling and workflows in your industry and knows how to work with them to achieve the results you strive for.  

• Transparency and control. As already stated, you trust your cloud service provider a lot, as they have full access to your cloud data and are responsible for how it is handled. Achieve transparency in your cooperation with your MCSP and maintain control over the process. Reliable cloud service providers should always alert you of any changes, report issues, show performance metrics, etc.  

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Our Cloud Managed Services: Benefits of working with Symphony Solutions  

Symphony Solutions can help you implement your long-term strategic plans by managing your Cloud ecosystem from deployment to maintenance. Our managed teams comprise experienced Cloud engineers, handpicked to suit your specific needs and vision for the project. Your managed team is a single point of responsibility that maintains a stable cloud environment and controls any possible security or compliance issues before they arise.  

What to expect when working with us? The cloud infrastructure managed services that we offer fall under the main categories:  

• Incident management for providing SLA-based technical support and initial issue resolution, monitoring status and executing escalated requests.  

• Request fulfillment for system configuration, report generation, functional sanity check, etc.  

• System monitoring for monitoring system health and business metrics, preventing negative impact on service operation.  

• Knowledge management for continuously creating a knowledge base with scenarios for the support team on initial incident management.  
    

These are the managed services that Symphony Solutions offers as your trusted Cloud services provider. Moreover, by bringing the clients together with established teams of experts to provide DevOps services, we fully accommodate the client, whether they are setting out on their cloud transformation journey, require a solid solution for building data warehouses or data lakes, or need an expert team for cloud-native application development. The client benefits from the fast-track delivery of applications as the development team can solely focus on the business objectives while the cloud-managed services team takes care of the system’s health and metrics. This was the case with Goat Interactive when our cloud-managed services team took over managing system monitoring and resolving any and all issues 24/7 without the immediate involvement of the development team.  

Summing up 

With cloud management services, you can benefit from a secure and flexible solution and know that your MCSP’s team has all hands on board making sure that it’s running smoothly ready to jump in at any sight of trouble. Anything from bug fixes, incident statistics analysis, periodical backups, and other important maintenance operations are covered by your vendor while you can focus on strategic business growth.  

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