4 Things Every Services Provider Should Know About Enterprise Clouds

By Ellen Rubin, CEO of ClearSky Data

If you’re a managed service provider (MSP), you know the drill: your customers hear about an innovative trend and look to you to turn this into real business results quickly. As cloud computing gains broad market adoption, your customers have high hopes that you can deliver the cloud’s economics, flexibility and on-demand capacity to their existing data center environments while keeping their top business priorities in mind. In other words, they see the potential for innovation, and they can’t wait to see the results — with you leading the way.

Luckily, today’s MSPs are up to the challenge. In response to customer needs, MSPs are adding cloud services to their standard portfolios, developing intellectual property and rolling out tailored cloud service plans. As a result, according to IDC, 51 percent of companies hosting compute and storage on Amazon Web Services (AWS) are moving their data back on-premise or enlisting third-party providers to manage public cloud services for them. Fifty-eight percent of those companies report finding better prices when they work with third-party service providers.

If you’re new to the enterprise cloud bandwagon, it’s not too late to get started. But to avoid “cloudwashing” traditional offerings and instead create services with true customer value, here are four tips for building cloud into your business.

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