One of the challenges that many businesses struggle to overcome is how to keep up with the massive (and on-going) changes in technology and implement best practices for managing them. The Public Cloud—in particular, Hyperscale Cloud providers like AWS—has ushered in a new era of IT technology. This technology changes rapidly and is designed to provide businesses with the building blocks that allow IT organizations to focus on innovation and growth, rather than mess with things that don’t differentiate their business.
A Hyperscale Managed Services Provider (MSP) can help address a very important gap for many businesses that struggle to:
- Keep up with the frenetic pace of change in Public Cloud
- Define and use best practices to achieve superior results
- Manage their infrastructure the most efficient way possible
In most cases, Hyperscale MSPs have deep expertise, technology, and automated capabilities to deliver high-quality managed service on a hyperscale platform. And because Hyperscale MSPs are solely focused to deliver capabilities on the cloud IaaS and PaaS that today’s enterprises are using, they are well versed in the best practices and standards to achieve the right results for their clients.
So, how do you go about selecting the right MSP? The answer to this question is critical because we believe choosing the right MSP is one of the most important decisions you will make when consuming the public cloud. It is also important to note that some of the qualifications to look for when selecting a Hyperscale MSP for your business needs are obvious, while others are more elusive. I’ve included a few suggestions below to keep in mind when evaluating and selecting the right Hyperscale MSP.
Expertise on the Platform of Your Choice
First and foremost, no two public cloud providers are the same. Each provider implements MSP strategies differently—from infrastructure and redundancy, to automation and billing concepts. Secondly, it isn’t enough for a provider to tell you they have a few applications running on the platform. When looking to entrust someone with your most valuable assets, expertise is key! An important KPI for measuring the capabilities of a MSP that many businesses overlook is the provider’s depth and breadth of experience. A qualified Hyperscale MSP will have the right certifications, accreditations, and certified engineer-to-customer ratios. You may feel good about signing with a large provider because they claim a higher number of certified engineers than the smaller firms, until…you realize their certified engineer-to-customer ratio is out of whack. Having 200 certified engineers means nothing if you have 5,000+ customers. At 2nd Watch, we have more certified engineers than we do customers, and we like it that way.
The Focus is on Customer Value
This is an obvious recommendation, but it does have some nuances. Many MSPs will simply take the “Your mess for less” approach to managing your infrastructure. Our customers tell us that one of the reasons they chose 2nd Watch was our focus on the things that matter to them. There are many MSPs that have technical capabilities to manage Cloud infrastructure but not all are able to focus in on how an enterprise wants to use the Public Cloud. MSPs with the ability to understand their client’s needs and goals tailor their approach to work for the enterprise vs. making them snap to some preconceived notion of how these things should work or function. Find an MSP that is willing to make the Public Cloud work the way you want it to and your overall experience, and the outcome, will be game changing.
Optimize, Optimize, Optimize
Moving to the Public Cloud is just the first step in the journey to realizing business value and transforming IT. The Cloud is dynamic in nature, and due to that fact, it is important that you don’t rest on just a migration once you are using it. New instance types, new services, or just optimizing what you are running today are great ways to ensure your infrastructure is running at top notch. It is important to make sure your MSP has a strong, ongoing story about optimization and how they will provide it. At 2nd Watch, we break optimization into 3 categories: Financial Optimization, Technical Optimization and Operations Optimization. It is a good idea to ask your MSP how they handle these three facets of optimization and at what cadence. Keep in mind that some providers’ pricing structures can act as a disincentive for optimization. For example, if your MSP’s billing structure is based on a percentage of your total cloud spend, and they reduce that bill by 30% through optimization efforts, that means they are now getting paid less, proportionately, and are likely not motivated to do this type of optimization on a regular basis as it hurts their revenue. Alternatively, we have also seen MSPs charge extra for these types of services, so the key is to make sure you ask if it’s included and get details about the services that would be considered an extra charge.
Full Service
The final qualification to look for in a Hyperscale MSP is whether they are a full-service provider. Too often, pure play MSPs are not able to provide a full service offering under their umbrella. The most common reason is that they lack professional services to assess and migrate workloads or cloud architects to build out new functionality.
Our enterprise clients tell us that one of their major frustrations is having to work with multiple vendors on a project. With multiple vendors, it is difficult to keep track of who is accountable and for what they are accountable. Why would the vendor that is migrating be motivated to make sure the application is optimized for support if they aren’t providing the support? I have heard horror stories of businesses trying to move to the cloud and becoming frustrated that multiple vendors are involved on the same workload, because the vendors blame each other for missing deadlines or not delivering key milestones or technical content. Your business will be better served by hiring an MSP who can run the full cloud-migration process—from workload assessment and migration to managing and optimizing your cloud infrastructure on an ongoing basis.
In addition to the tips I have listed above, 2nd Watch recommends utilizing Gartner’s Magic Quadrant to help evaluate the various public cloud managed service providers available to you. Gartner positioned 2nd Watch in the Leaders quadrant of the 2017 Gartner Magic Quadrant for Public Cloud Infrastructure Managed Service Providers, Worldwide for our completeness of vision and ability to execute. You can download and read the full report here.
-Kris Bliesner, CTO
Gartner does not endorse any vendor, product or service depicted in its research publications, and does not advise technology users to select only those vendors with the highest ratings or other designation. Gartner research publications consist of the opinions of Gartner’s research organization and should not be construed as statements of fact. Gartner disclaims all warranties, expressed or implied, with respect to this research, including any warranties of merchantability or fitness for a particular purpose. This graphic was published by Gartner, Inc. as part of a larger research document and should be evaluated in the context of the entire document.
