How Managed Service Providers (MSPs) Can Maintain Revenue And Relevance In The Cloud

By Eran Farajun, Executive Vice President of Asigra

The move to cloud-based computing is disrupting a familiar and lucrative business model for managed service providers (MSPs) and value added resellers (VARS) who have built their businesses on implementing and managing computing infrastructure for customers with traditional on-premises data centers – services now in dwindling demand. How do MSPs and VARs maintain revenue and relevance as customers increasingly go directly to cloud service providers for management of their cloud-based compute resources?

Hint: By “following the data,” providers can identify opportunities to deliver valuable new services to customers as they shift their data and workloads to the cloud. 

I believe the movement of data to the cloud will be an accelerator, not an inhibitor, to business success for MSPs and VARs. As customers move workloads to cloud platforms such as AWS and Microsoft Azure, and create and store data in cloud applications such as Salesforce.com and Microsoft Office 365, their data management needs change and evolve but don’t disappear. Service providers who can develop a set of cloud-data best practices and turn these into services for managing data in the cloud will be in the best position to monetize the migration to the cloud.

But this won’t be business as usual. Succeeding will require new strategies, development of new business relationships, and new ways of thinking about everything from how you price services to how you offer value to your clients.