8 benefits of managed cloud services

Summary

Why organizations choose managed cloud services when moving into the cloud.

Read time: 6 minutes

For many organizations, the question isn’t whether cloud hosting and cloud applications make sense. Rather, questions asked often concern –

What processes and/or applications make the most sense to move?
How to transition smoothly, especially making sure you have the right expertise?

Many businesses find the answer in managed cloud services.

What is a managed cloud service?

A managed cloud service provides IT management of your hosted cloud platforms and applications, allowing you to decide how much your team does and how much you outsource. If you do not have an IT team, you can outsource all the work. If you have a small IT team, you can outsource the time-consuming manual tasks, freeing time for more strategic activity. Even enterprises can benefit by adding expertise without expanding the payroll.

To understand the benefits of managed cloud services, we first must understand the difference between cloud applications and cloud hosting.

Cloud applications and examples

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a common description of a cloud application. Some well-known examples include:

A customer relationship management program (CRM) like SalesForce
Dropbox
Gmail
Google Analytics
Hubspot
Amazon Web Services
DocuWare
Ricoh Smart Integration

Of course, there are many, many others. Generally, you can access these applications from anywhere, all you need is an internet connection and the appropriate login credentials.

With cloud applications, you need an administrator, someone to manage who has access to the system and their level of access (user, administrator, etc…). What you don’t need is anyone to setup, partition a drive, load software and applications, or manage technical elements like software updates. That is all handled by the application provider – and that typically includes training and employee support too.

Cloud hosting is different

Cloud hosting features a server and network infrastructure typically run from a data center where software partitions a single piece of hardware. It may include a hosted application, like a Microsoft 365®. Often, it simply features multiple, often virtual servers setup for optimized load balancing to prevent downtime.

Effectively, you move your network server into the cloud, giving you greater flexibility and ease to expand (or reduce) capacity as needed. In the case of a Microsoft 365®, both your email server and software run from the cloud. You may still need to load applications locally to laptops.

The advantages are numerous. A few big ones are:

You have cost savings with less hardware to manage, upgrade, and update.
Your IT team has more time not managing hardware related issues.
Being offsite, you have a natural business continuity plan in place. If you need to leave the office, you can still access all your business tools from your company laptop or configured home computer with a VPN connection.

The thing about most cloud hosting is, you still need technical expertise to configure and manage the systems. You need someone who can configure your servers. Someone must load your company-specific applications that do need to be on your server. Someone needs to load the local PC applications that connect with your applications. You need IT.

And that’s why managed cloud services continue to grow in popularity, especially today. Here are 8 ways organizations benefit from them.

#1. A foundation for business continuity (and disaster recovery)

A managed cloud service fits neatly with business continuity planning (BCP).

Your server, applications, and server hardware (which you rent as part of your cloud hosting agreement), are in one location, and with redundancy to ensure uptime.
Your managed service provider has its own BCP to ensure they can meet their service level agreements (SLAs), which means you’ll continue to receive service even in the event of a disaster.
Your IT team or business contacts (like an operations manager) can direct the effort from anywhere and even access the applications to execute any tasks as needed.

Distributed tools and teams like this limit the impact of a disaster that would otherwise disrupt operations.

An important facet of the business continuity benefit is disaster recovery, or the ability to recover data and/or systems due to technology-specific events like data breaches, ransomware, and destruction of hardware like laptops and servers (not an issue for cloud-hosted solutions).

Managed cloud service providers back-up the hosted systems as part of their offering. You may also be able to take advantage of services like disaster recovery as a service (DRaaS) that backs up your operating systems, files and data, applications, and all configurations.

If your managed cloud service provider offers IT management services, you may also be able to get endpoint protection and backup for local devices like PCs.

Finding the right managed cloud service provider

To get the biggest benefit from a managed cloud service, you need to find the right managed cloud service provider. In “What to look for in a managed cloud service provider”, we explore what to ask and how to evaluate, so that you can be sure to find the best one for you.

If a managed cloud sounds right for you, we can help.

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