Nowadays, almost every business environment is a digital one. Regardless of what industry it’s operating in, every company has an online presence, a broad digital reach, and a large amount of data that requires round-the-clock protection.
From a local vet clinic to an international oil company – all businesses are considering a switch to cloud services if they haven’t made it already. The rise of handy SaaS platforms has made cloud computing indispensable to the average company. But the question is – how do you efficiently secure and manage your cloud-based data?
The answer is simple: cloud managed services. And we’ll tell you all about the benefits of employing these services right here, and help you grow your business in the modern world!
Cloud Managed Services 101
So, what are cloud managed services in the first place? Generally speaking, these are IT processes that you outsource to other companies, who help by managing your cloud storage and hosting for you. As a result, your business applications keep churning along to the tune of the best security and data management standards and protocols.
These managed service providers – MSPs – do all the heavy lifting for you. They can handle the entire cloud deployment process when you switch to the cloud. And after that, they deal with offsite backup, hosting management, and various other cloud-based processes.
How does this benefit your business? Well, you don’t have to deal with physical data storage or on-site data processing – all the responsibilities and expenses are shifted to the cloud, where they’re considerably lower. And since you’re not handling the cloud migration or maintenance yourself, you get a lot of free time, which you can use to improve other aspects of your business and customer experience.
Better Cybersecurity
Whether you’ve shifted your company’s tech stack to a SaaS-first cloud environment doesn’t matter – even with a more traditional setup, you’re still connected to the Internet. And that means your company is a lot more open to potential cyberattacks.
Since the start of the pandemic, we’ve experienced a global rise of cybercrime – especially the kind that targets small and medium-sized businesses that don’t have robust cybersecurity. And that’s one of the major things you can improve through cloud managed services.
An MSP can provide the additional security layers your company needs to mitigate potential attacks. Of course, anyone who guarantees your business will be 100% attack-proof is overselling their services; no one can guarantee that. However, every step toward risk mitigation and management will improve your chances of fending off attacks and reduce the costs of any attacks that do happen.
Easier Budgeting
Today, any business that wants to be successful needs to be flexible and quick to adapt – especially if you’re in e-commerce or any Internet-first industry. After all, you’re in a global market filled with competitors worldwide; the last thing you can afford is complacency.
However, pivoting and planning are harder if you don’t have a handle on your infrastructure costs. On the other hand, you can’t scale and grow if you put a cap on your infrastructure.
An MSP helps you solve this problem by giving you all the services you need and the ability to scale them – without investing in a bigger server network or paying exorbitant sums for maintenance.
Cloud services can easily be adjusted depending on whether your business’s online traffic and footprint increase or decrease; you’re not tied down to any specific infrastructure, and you can serve as many customers as you have at the moment.
This brings us to another important point – infrastructure costs in general. When you’ve got your own servers, the accompanying expenses are huge. And you probably don’t need them unless you’re literally Facebook. Maintaining substantial hardware is costly – and cloud services are dirt-cheap in comparison.
You don’t have to deal with server repairs or maintenance – cloud services come at a fixed annual or monthly cost that’s easily predictable. This allows for much simpler and more accurate business planning. And if you partner with a great MSP, you get top-tier network infrastructure without investing a single dime in them.
More Uptime
For customer-oriented companies that work over the Internet, everything is about uptime. Customers are easily frustrated if your systems are down for any amount of time – and in today’s culture of short attention spans and global online services, they’ll quickly shift to one of your competitors.
That’s why network monitoring is important but also difficult to achieve with a small or non-existing IT department. Luckily, managed cloud services provide massive uptime while outsourcing the entire network maintenance process to someone else.
Besides lowering your business expenses, this also means you can focus your resources and manpower on core operations without worrying about optimal uptime. Cloud-based MSPs are there to ensure the stability of your network 24/7.