Companies are increasing their reliance on IT outsourcing.

You heard it straight from CIO; two-thirds of American companies have outsourced all or part of their IT needs within the last 12 months. Businesses have clearly made the decision to leverage the cloud, and now they are flocking to managed services providers (MSPs) to help manage their increasingly complicated cloud infrastructure needs.

This article will take a closer look at some of the reasons businesses of all sizes should consider cloud-based managed services versus internal cloud management.

Outsourced IT — Big Benefits for Cloud Application Services

The required efficiency and reliability IT networks is growing more important in an era of constant connectedness. Your internal and external stakeholders, from employees to customers, all demand 24/7 access to critical business functions and services. Keeping up with that demand can be very difficult. That’s why cloud computing is so important.  But moving to the cloud is not enough.  The cloud must be planned and managed in much the same way as traditional on-premise infrastructure environments.

The CompTIA 4^th Annual Trends in Managed Service Study lists some of the key reasons companies are seeking managed services:

• Improving reliability and efficiency of a network.
• Increased security and compliance.
• ROI and cost savings.

Internal and external stakeholders are demanding constant access.

These are all good reasons to outsource, but what are some of the benefits of making this decision? Here are the top four benefits of outsourcing cloud management to an MSP:

1. Increasingly, outsourced IT means providing additional resources to an over-stressed technology department. Generally, this means companies leverage managed services as a compliment to their full-time IT staff. This frees them up to take on key strategic projects. While the managed service provider is handling cloud application services, the IT team can be rolling out new technology or designing a custom app.
2. Managed services allow for infrastructure customization. InfoWorld points out that generic cloud applications are designed to maximize economy of scale for the provider, which means you are less in control of changes. MSPs allow for hybrid cloud models designed to enable customizations, something a straight cloud solution may not provide.
3. MSPs can help you deploy in waves or in a big bang, depending upon which parts of your critical business functions are prepared – or not prepared. This can be particularly important in industries such as healthcare, where multi-state, disparate functions are rolled up to a corporate health system.
4. One word: security. CIO suggests that “…companies have shifted their views over security as it has become clear that security problems are often the result of human error by internal staff.”  This may be true because tech teams at the enterprise level are often working on legacy platforms and may not be in an environment of continual learning, unlike the environment cultivated in cutting-edge consulting firms. MSPs providers are constantly challenged to stay on top of security, which is a key part of the job. The sheer volume of new clients in a managed services firm keeps your outsourced IT team on its toes.

Clearly, the migration to cloud models is necessitating additional resources to manage a secure, efficient architecture. Managed services for your cloud environment is the latest partnership that will benefit you, your organization, and the critical business functions you are tasked with protecting.

Contact us to talk about leveraging a Managed Services Provider.