Why Managed Services May be Your Best Cloud Strategy

To avoid the expense and hassle of hosting data on-premises, many businesses are opting to migrate to Amazon Web Services (AWS) for its scalability and versatility. However, utilizing in-house resources to migrate to AWS and managing the cloud environment post-migration can be a significant burden. Cloud infrastructure is complex and optimizing it requires hiring personnel with specialized knowledge. However, when problems arise, asking an expert consultant for assistance may be inevitable. This is why more and more businesses are outsourcing their cloud management to AWS managed cloud services providers. With AWS Cloud managed services, an expert AWS Premier Consulting Partner will not only migrate your applications to the Cloud, but also manage all aspects of your cloud environment thereafter. Here’s why managed services may be your best cloud strategy.

Managed Services Cloud Strategy

If you’re migrating applications to AWS, you have the perfect opportunity to move to managed services. Migration gives your managed services provider the chance to design and implement a cloud environment that can deliver greater performance than your legacy system and better support your business goals. With an optimized infrastructure that runs all your applications with zero maintenance work on your part, adopting a managed services cloud strategy enables you to focus on your primary business model instead of being held back by routine infrastructure management tasks.

How do you know if you’re working with a knowledgeable AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) who can deliver a leading managed services cloud strategy? There are several ways. Their services follow a continuous engagement, continuous delivery, continuous growth approach, which is very different from 20th-century managed services. Their services are agile, pay-as-you-go, and as flexible as the AWS cloud itself. Furthermore, an experienced MSP delivers collaborative managed cloud service, not a “black box” service that lacks transparency.

The MSP you choose should offer CloudOps that integrate with customer development teams to drive insights on application performance as well as optimize applications and workloads. They should also offer Managed DevOps service that integrates with your software development sprint cadence, driving all the benefits of cloud native application development and services.

Your MSP should be able to identify opportunities for application modernization in the migration process. Finally, they should offer agile, pay-as-you-go, and plan-as-you-go managed DevOps that avoid heavy, slow, obsolete statements of work. By choosing an MSP that is superior in all of these areas, your firm will gain greater technical and financial benefits than what your legacy infrastructure provides.

Here are just a few examples of what an experienced AWS MSP can provide:

• AWS Cloud Management: AWS Certified CloudOps engineers can take over a variety of operational tasks, including expert account configuration, 24/7/365 monitoring, comprehensive routine maintenance, and other next-gen AWS managed services. Doing so concentrates the AWS cloud’s ability to revolutionize your operations.
• Managed DevOps: By automating repeated tasks you can make your team more productive, and increase accuracy. DevOps automation can harness your team’s true potential in terms of innovation and productivity by optimizing your cloud architecture, adding infrastructure automation and deployment, and implementing expert roadmapping. Let a qualified MSP help you apply automation to drive organizational efficiency and modernization.
• Managed Security: With the help of sophisticated tooling, you can gain powerful cloud security and incident response services, built on AWS security best practices, automated data collection, and real-time threat detection. A vigilant MSP will continuously monitor your environment to detect threats. When unusual behavior is detected, your managed security system will automatically send out alerts that will enable your MSP security team to respond immediately.
• Managed Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Applications can be optimized to offer a high-performance, data-driven infrastructure. This is achieved by applying real-time insights, root-cause analysis, and rapid response and remediation. Your MSP will use these methods to optimize your applications’ performance, as well as constantly measure performance for any deviations that require quick remediation.
• Cloud Optimization: Cloud optimization experts can cut costs while maintaining the highest levels of performance. This may be done through accurate cost attribution, strategic cost reduction, leveraging new technologies, and clear invoicing and spend analysis. A quality MSP will reduce costs while ensuring that you don’t compromise performance by reducing growth, under-provisioning resources, or lowering resilience.

An AWS Managed Service Provider can also provide consulting services on any of these subjects:

• Cloud Migration Services: A cloud managed provider can help you migrate your workloads to AWS in an optimal way that’s fast, reduces downtime, and avoids problems. This is done through migration readiness and planning work, efficiency expert implementation, and post migration and optimization services based on experience. Your MSP will provide an optimal workload migration that can revolutionize how you execute your core business model and pave the way for future growth
• Containerization: A qualified AWS MSP can kick off your new cloud strategy by offering containerization guidance. Containerization technologies vary, so advice from an expert consultant can help you make an optimal selection. AWS has many services that can manage and store your containers. With a wide variety of ways to run containers and microservices, AWS can manage workloads of all sizes through container management tools like Amazon ECR, Amazon ECS, Amazon EKS, AWS Fargate, and Amazon EC2. With consulting advice from a qualified MSP, you can be sure your containerization will be configured to reduce resource wastage, as much as possible.
• Going Serverless (with AWS Lambda): Serverless Architecture can offer you valuable benefits, including advanced scaling, efficiency, agility, and cost-savings. This is even more true if you chose to go with AWS Lambda. Let your MSP implement serverless infrastructure to take server maintenance off of your hands so you’ll never have to worry about problems like load balancing or manual workloads ever again.
• AWS Best Practices Via a Well-Architected Review: By conducting a thorough review, AWS experts can ensure your applications are built using the best practices of the Well-Architected Framework. This includes applying benchmarked best practices, in-depth guidance, and expert implementation that harnesses the power of AWS. Your MSP will compare your workload to Well-Architected best practices to make your infrastructure more efficient and reliable.
• Industry Verticals: There are MSPs that also offer highly-informed consulting advice to specific industry verticals. For example, there are MSPs who can assist media and entertainment companies with streaming technologies like AWS Elemental. There are MSPs who help game publishers in the gaming industry. Lastly, there are extremely specialized MSPs who have achieved AWS competencies in Healthcare and Life Sciences to help Healthcare and Life Sciences companies manage and optimize their AWS environments.

Getting Started

When migrating applications to AWS, don’t struggle with the challenges of implementing and managing them by yourself. Consult with an AWS Premier Consulting Partner to see if managed services would be a good fit for your business. A highly-qualified AWS partner offers services that take a continuous engagement, continuous delivery, continuous growth approach that are very different from 20th-century managed services. The end result: applications that let you respond quickly to changing business needs.