When 32% of business leaders cite a lack of knowledge is preventing them from using the cloud, it’s small wonder the global managed services market is forecasted to surpass $200B in 2020.
A lack of knowledge and preparedness can easily stall a cloud migration, causing a plethora of issues around productivity. Fortunately, cloud managed services can help assure successful migrations. Strategic service providers provide complete solutions that optimize a cloud investment by accelerating adoption, lowering operational costs and mitigating any security and compliance risk, all while using automation to reduce the chances of human error and stalled migrations.
Here’s a closer look at the top three benefits cloud managed services, particularly AWS managed services, can offer:
Accelerate AWS adoption
As our world evolves, businesses feel tightening pressure to migrate to the cloud. This leads many organizations to dive into a fast migration they aren’t fully prepared for that ultimately stalls out.
AWS migrations offer teams the ability to drive further business value in various ways, but manual migrations are also expensive and painstaking endeavors, potentially setting up a disaster if migration stalls. The most common challenges that halt an AWS migration include:
- Tasking employees with migration processes as well as ongoing daily operational tasks once workloads are migrated
- Daily manual processes that take employees away from strategic tasks
- Lack of specific expertise in cloud
- Complicating interdependencies between compliance, security and operational functions and needs
AWS managed services help standardize the operating environment by providing guidance from certified staff and experienced architects as well as handling ongoing operations and system management. For example, the average time to generate a return on investment from an AWS migration is around 12 months. However, using managed services, business leaders typically see improvement and return within two to three weeks.
Improved security and compliance
One of the major concerns that arise when discussing AWS migrations with potential customers is security and compliance. Expensive fines come with a compliance breach, and with so many regulatory bodies to track, the fear of something falling through the cracks can easily dissuade some businesses from migrating.
However, AWS managed services operate differently and track every process and change. For example, customers use a platform dashboard to submit changes to their environment, and only the managed service provider team has full access to the infrastructure. Once a change ticket is submitted, the employees gain system access for up to eight hours, where the managed service team can track any changes made and ensure compliance and security standards are upheld.
A comprehensive AWS managed services provider can not only ensure security within the cloud but also secure the entire IT ecosystem operating outside of AWS through bundled offerings tied to different business functions.
Cost optimization through automation
AWS managed services both promote an environment based on security and compliance and emphasize automation to improve productivity and optimize costs.
The level of automation achieved through AWS managed services are a key-value point. For example, when I spoke with John McMillan, Senior Partner Development Manager at AWS, he shared that “one customer completed their workload migration in about six months and in one month submitted over 30,000 changes. Ninety-seven percent of those were completed through automation, which allowed more time for creativity.”
Businesses adopt new technology with the goal to prepare for the future. Cloud migrations are no different. Utilizing AWS managed services helps achieve cost optimization, reduce migration time and prioritize security and compliance, all of which dramatically improves business operations.
