Managed Cloud Services – Part 1: Overcoming Cloud Challenges

Approximately two thirds of German businesses use the cloud in their daily work, representing 11 percent year-on-year growth. However, knowing how to get the most out of the cloud can be challenging. The first part of this blog series looks at how we can enable organizations to leverage the potential of the cloud.

Managing cloud infrastructure internally at your company can present many obstacles, such as unpredictable costs or efforts to adapt the landscape to the needs of your business. For this reason, many businesses are seeking support from managed cloud service providers to get the most out of the available cloud technology. This also helps to relieve their employees of the burden of continuously maintaining a dynamic cloud environment.

Each company has different requirements and faces different challenges, but there is no universal reason for why organizations may make this shift to a managed services provider. Here are some of the common pain points for modern businesses when it comes to the cloud and how opting for managed cloud services can overcome these.

Innovation Remains the Key Driver of Business Success

In the digital age, the business landscape is growing faster than ever before and requires businesses to have a scalable cloud platform to adapt to fluctuating demands. As your IT infrastructure expands, complexity increases and so does the level of risk when customizing it. If you make a mistake when making changes to your cloud environment, it is possible for this to result in service disruption or even losing vital company data.

Businesses must continuously innovate to keep up with the pace of the rapidly changing market. Failure to do so means falling behind the competition.

So should you err on the side of caution and just do nothing? Absolutely not! This is where an expert partner can help you. Managed services providers are experts in their field. If you wish to innovate then you can turn to them for guidance, planning, and implementation. You maintain the ability to innovate and remove the level of risk.

Striking the Right Balance between Standardization and Customization

Customization of your cloud infrastructure is important so that your platform meets your business requirements. However, a managed services partner should ideally offer you as much standardization as possible. This keeps costs and complexity low, and an expert partner can help you find the right base model for your company. On the other hand, when you need to make changes to your environment, your managed cloud services provider can use its industry experience to adapt your cloud platform to best suit your needs. This level of expertise is difficult to cultivate internally, particularly at small and medium-sized enterprises.

Having Someone to Turn to When the Going Gets Tough

Sometimes it’s hard to know what you need to do to improve efficiency with your cloud platform. In this situation, having a partner to turn to for guidance is an invaluable asset. Rather than letting your cloud infrastructure grow out of control, hand over infrastructure management to an organization, such as NTT DATA Business Solutions, with many years of experience assisting companies from different industries and of varying sizes.

Furthermore, if someone is taking care of key tasks, such as infrastructure management, upgrades, and maintenance, you free up vital resources. Your IT department can focus on its core business and do what it was put in place to do – provide your enterprise with internal technical support.

Data Protection and Compliance with Managed Cloud Services

Complying with regulations, such as GDPR, and ensuring vital company or customer data is protected can also cause businesses a headache. This clearly must be taken seriously but stretches internal resources. IT departments must stay up to date with regulations that are often subject to change. A dedicated partner will be well-versed in different regional requirements and cybersecurity measures as this is something they take care for numerous enterprises – often in many different countries. This ensures you have peace of mind and one less thing to take care of.

Multi-Cloud Services the Next Big Thing?

The cloud is a key driver of digitization and is constantly developing. The emerging trend with cloud technology is what is known as multi-cloud. This is the coordination of numerous cloud services within a single environment. Once again, this puts a huge amount of pressure on IT departments. If knowledge and practices are not up to date, your business is unlikely to be able to adapt. An experienced partner can perform these changes for you, ensuring you always fulfill legal requirements and overcome any technology or resource-based challenges when developing your landscape.

The second part of this blog series will address which IT tasks are no longer necessary at modern businesses and what makes global managed services for the cloud pay off.