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This is a question posed by businesses we speak to – why do I need a Public Cloud Managed Service Provider like Logicata? Why can I not just manage my own cloud? Why should not just deal directly with AWS and Azure and do it all myself?
And the answer of course is yes – you can do it yourself, as long as you have access to the necessary skills & tooling that you will need to manage your cloud in a secure, cost effective and efficient manner.
OK, so what skills do I need? Are they not all provided by my Cloud Service Provider?
Again, to some extent the answer is ‘Yes’. You can purchase enhanced support levels from AWS and Azure, but this tends to be reactive support – if you get stuck or something breaks, the CSP will help you fix it. But oftentimes something breaking is not the result of a failure on the part of the CSP – it is a result of a mis-configuration or misuse of the tools available from the CSP – i.e. not following best practise. You will not get architecture and proactive best practise advice under a CSP support contract.
But how do I know what best practice is?
Well, you can invest in training and certifications for both AWS and Azure, thus up-skilling your team in the various tools and best practices so that they can apply them to your cloud deployment. Your team however will only have exposure to your own environment, and the knowledge they gain from the training.
And what about tooling – can I not just use the CSP native tools?
AWS and Azure provide many tools to manage your Public Cloud environment – monitoring, cost optimization, best practice advice, security advice etc. But there are a number of issues with using native tools. Firstly, monitoring your environment from within your environment is not a great idea – third party monitoring tools give you an external view point of what is going on within your public cloud, not only from an infrastructure perspective, but also from an application performance perspective, which is ultimately what your users care about. Then there are the features and functionality – 3rd party tools specialize in a specific discipline, be it monitoring, security, cost optimization etc. This specialization brings with it a richness of functionality which will enable you to fully optimize your cloud environment more effectively than the cloud native tools.
Alternatively you could rely on a Public Cloud Managed Service Provider. MSPs have already made the investment in the skills and tooling required to manage your AWS or Azure environments in a secure, cost effective and efficient way. In managing multiple customer environments, Managed Service Providers have seen how to do things well, and not so well, and we can apply these learnings to your platform to ensure that you extract maximum value from your cloud.
So what can I expect a Managed Service Provider to do for me?
A Managed Service Provider will offer a range of services, including:
- Monitoring – Infrastructure and Application level monitoring of your Public Cloud resources
- Patch Management – Operating System Patching of the guest OS in your EC2 Instances and Azure VMs
- Data Backup – backup and restore of the data in your EC2 Instances, Azure VMs and Cloud Databases
- Security Operations – Endpoint Protection, Threat & Vulnerability Management
- Incident & Change Management – 24x7x365 support for incidents, and management of changes to your cloud environment
- Cost Optimization – billing management, removal, rightsizing and reserving of infrastructure to optimize spend
- Monthly Reporting – Service review meetings and documented reports of all activities in the previous service period
- Continuous Improvement – modernization of your cloud infrastructure to increase the availability, security and efficiency of your cloud resources.
And how do Public Cloud Managed Service Providers typically charge for their services?
The most widely adopted charging model is a percentage of your AWS or Azure bill. That percentage can range from 15-80% of the monthly service provider bill, depending on the level of services and support offered by the MSP.
