What is a Managed Cloud Server? How Can It Benefit My MSP Clients (and Me)?

Posted on by Melanie Purkis
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The Answer to the Need for Effective Public Cloud Support and Cost Savings is Managed Cloud Servers

Over the last few years, companies have flocked to the cloud, putting at least a quarter of their data on Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, and other public cloud platforms. They now realize that the anticipated benefits of lower costs, simplicity, increased speed, and always-on availability are not as easily achieved as originally represented, and almost impossible to achieve on their own.

What are the Challenges of Unmanaged Public Cloud Infrastructure?

Unanticipated challenges of a company attempting to manage their own public cloud infrastructure are:

  • Limited IT expertise, the inability to easily compare services across vendors, and an inadequate understanding of how selecting individual cloud services can impact price, causes companies to continually overspend.
  • The benefit of public cloud elasticity becomes a financial drawback when over-provisioning occurs, or server and application resources are added in a time of need but not removed when no longer needed.
  • Focus on public cloud infrastructure, data, and ongoing usage requirements limit the time and resources available to concentrate on other IT projects, strategic initiatives, or corporate goals.

While public cloud computing is a valuable resource, without support from an MSP partner it can quickly become a financial liability for businesses trying to do it on their own.

Liquid Web’s Managed Cloud Servers combine the scalability and agility of public cloud with 24/7/365 support from the Most Helpful Humans in Hosting.

As an MSP, the addition of Managed Cloud Servers to your portfolio of services can be a financially lucrative opportunity.

  • You can cross-sell additional services to existing customers for whom you may currently sell traditional managed services.
  • You can onboard new customers with a managed cloud server solution and cross-sell additional security, continuity, and compliance services.
  • You can become an expert in helping businesses migrate from on-premise servers to the cloud.
  • You will increase your Monthly Recurring Revenue (MRR) and realize a steady increase in revenue growth.

managed cloud hosting delivers affordability and scalable resources

Managed Cloud Servers

What are Managed Cloud Servers?

Managed Cloud Servers enable you to combine the best elements of public cloud and private cloud hosting to deliver to your customers a highly scalable, reliable, secure, and customizable cloud solution at a more cost-effective price.

You can provision the specific dedicated IT resources your client needs exactly when they are needed. There is no need to provision and pay for extra resources, only to have them sit unused in anticipation of use months in the future.

Since each virtual server acts as a private cloud stack, you can configure the stack as needed. It can be as unique as each clients’ business needs.

The value of Managed Cloud Servers to you as an MSP is the technical support, expertise, and infrastructure resources available to and managed for you. Proactive network management, system administration, performance testing and maintenance, sophisticated redundancy measures, and multi-level security enable you to support your client without having to worry about infrastructure management.

Benefits of Managed Cloud Servers for Your Clients (and You)

1. Dedicated Expertise

Your clients want an MSP partner who has the expertise and focus to help them transform their business. Digital transformation, cybersecurity, compliance, and mobile device management are just four complex elements of IT management that today’s companies require.

Managed Cloud Servers enable you to effectively deliver on your clients’ needs by leveraging a dedicated team of engineers who focus solely on cloud infrastructure management, so you don’t have to. Their wealth of expertise and 24/7 network monitoring and management removes the burden of infrastructure management from your shoulders and enables you to focus on helping your clients achieve their business goals.

2. Controlled Spending

While many businesses flocked to the public cloud based on the promise of significant IT cost savings, they now realize that for inexperienced managers, the public cloud can be more expensive than even a dedicated private cloud option.

Managed Cloud Servers enable you to rein in your clients’ IT expenses, helping them stay on budget. 24/7 usage monitoring helps eliminate unused or underutilized infrastructure, hardware, and application resources, requiring your client to pay only for the computing resources they use. The ability to spin up virtual servers on-demand and eliminate them when not needed maximizes cost optimization.

3. Security

Your clients appreciate the agility and scalability of the public cloud but require the protection of a private cloud to keep their data and employees secure.

A Managed Cloud Server infrastructure provides the capabilities of a public cloud but is built from the ground up with security at its core. It enables you to provide your clients with the security management they need but does not require you to maintain servers or continually monitor network threats.

4. Agility

The Covid-19 pandemic has provided us with the perfect example of why your clients must be able to adjust to a crisis in near real-time. While agility may have seemed more like a buzz word in the past, it is now a must-have element of IT governance.

Transforming from premise-based applications and databases to an always-on public cloud that accommodates their newly remote workforce requires the tools and human resources to be as agile as the situation demands.

5. Scalability and Speed of Deployment

The need to stay two steps ahead of competitors requires your clients’ IT resources to scale on-demand as business and market requirements change. They must be able to immediately spin up servers and applications in times of high demand, and just as quickly eliminate those resources when they are no longer needed or there are budgetary constraints.

Managed Cloud Servers are a ready-to-scale service that you can implement and deploy at a moment’s notice. You can quickly and easily enable one server, and add additional servers when unexpected website usage or database spikes are observed. When the need for additional servers and system resources is over, these resources can just as easily be removed.

6. Improved Efficiencies and Reduced Waste

An unmanaged public cloud can quickly become unwieldy with application and infrastructure waste. Your clients can easily become confused over which services are right for today’s requirements as well as anticipated future needs. This results in excess resources which may or may not work well together.

Managed Cloud Servers enable you to help your clients eliminate waste and achieve their business goals with effective service evaluation, selection, prioritization, and implementation.

7. Availability

Redundancy measures and guaranteed uptime availability are two critical capabilities of a cloud environment. Constant availability ensures that your clients’ employees can be their most productive wherever they may be and able to work when and how it is most convenient for them.

While high-availability resources are important, you do not have the time to deploy, monitor, and maintain them. Managed Cloud Servers provide load balancing, clustering, storage and failover protection, firewall protection, redundant network paths, and other high-availability measures. They are fully managed to maintain a consistently available infrastructure so you will not have to stress over managing them yourself.

Companies who once eagerly moved to the public cloud now realize that with minimal internal IT expertise and no external technical support, the anticipated benefits of the public cloud are impossible to achieve on their own. They need the dedicated support of a trusted MSP partner like you.

Liquid Web’s Managed Cloud Servers

Liquid Web’s Managed Cloud Servers are built on an out of the box, ready to scale, fully managed public cloud platform which provides you with the flexibility to meet the changing IT needs of clients while our team of highly skilled engineers manages and maintain all infrastructure components for you. Automated provisioning, 24/7 infrastructure management, advanced monitoring, and multi-level security standards are included.

Because we know that no two businesses’ IT needs are alike, Liquid Web also offers a comprehensive portfolio of bare metal, dedicated server, web hosting, and hybrid cloud solutions combined with application services and fully managed support. We can deliver the right IT solution for the right business requirements, right now.

Need a Managed Cloud Solution With Rapid Deployment and Scalable Resources? Try Managed Cloud Servers With Liquid Web.

Liquid Web Managed Cloud Hosting

About the Author

Melanie Purkis

Melanie Purkis is the Director of Liquid Web's Managed Hosting Products & Services. Melanie has more than 25 years of experience with professional leadership, project management, process development, and technical support experience in the IT industry.

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