Why Use Managed Cloud Services?

Managed cloud services have quickly become the first choice of organizations that wish to leverage cloud computing capability with almost negligible overhead of operations. There are quite several strong reasons why businesses of all sizes are taking up managed cloud solutions:

Reduced operational complexity.

Key advantages of managed cloud services include the significant reduction in the complexity of operation. In a managed service, much of the day-to-day maintenance required to be carried out on an ongoing basis in order to run the cloud infrastructure and platforms is looked after by the provider itself-including critical tasks such as:

- Provisioning and configuration of servers

- Patching and updating the software

- Monitoring of security and mitigation of threats

- Optimization of performance

- Backup and disaster recovery

Since the above accountabilities are off-loaded to the service provider, the organization is free to focus the IT resources on high-value activities that support core business objectives. Organizations thereby use people and budget better.

Enhanced Security and Compliance

Security continues to remain at or near the top of many organizations' lists in the minds of those contemplating adoption of cloud services. Managed cloud providers help address those concerns by offering robust security capabilities that otherwise might be difficult or very costly for any single business to implement.

Well-established managed cloud providers have dedicated security teams and advanced tools to monitor threats, detect anomalies, and respond to incidents. They often support features such as:

- Data Encryption - at rest and in transit

- Identity and Access Management

- Network Segmentation and Firewalls

- Vulnerability scanning and penetration testing

- SIEM

Many managed cloud services are designed with compliance in mind. Providers maintain many of the key standards, such as HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, and ISO 27001. This can make compliance simpler for organizations who operate in regulated industries.

Scalability and Performance

With managed cloud services, it's crystal clear that they have that expertise in the scalability and elasticity necessary to affect changes in accordance with fluctuating workloads. The providers of such clouds maintain large pools of computing resources that can quickly be allocated when demanded peaks shoot up. Consequently, firms are not required to overprovision their infrastructure to accommodate peak loads.

In addition, leading cloud platforms leverage world networks of data centers and edge locations to optimize performance. Content delivery networks and intelligent routing ensure that users can easily reach applications and data with minimal latency across the globe.

Cost Optimization

Even if the cost saving of cloud computing is well established, managed services can offer additional cost advantages. For an organization, the total cost of ownership (TCO) in the majority of cases will be lower by offloading the management of its infrastructure to a service provider than in the case of managing cloud resources on its own.

This is accomplished by way of: economies of scale, that is to say, by making use of its size to get better pricing on hardware and software, as well as operational efficiency with automated management tools and processes that save labor cost.

- Pay-as-you-go pricing: Organizations pay only for the resources they consume and there are no capital expenditures upfront.

- Cost of training reduced: Organisations can maintain in-house expertise on cloud technologies.

Managed services also provide greater predictability in cost as many of them are charged using a fixed monthly fee. This allows easier budgeting and financial planning for IT spending.

Access to Expertise and Innovation

Cloud computing technologies constantly change, and it becomes really challenging for the internal IT teams to keep up to date at times. Service providers stay focused on these technologies and invest heavily in training the employees. So by partnering with a managed service provider, an organization taps into a deep pool of expertise.

The cloud providers are always found at the leading edge in innovation related to artificial intelligence and machine learning, with respect to edge computing. Many of these emerging technologies go hand-in-glove with managed services, giving businesses the opportunity to tap into them without massive upfront investment or deep knowledge.

Shorter Time-to-Market

Agility in the business environment today means this: it accelerates the time to market for new applications and services, as well as the consumption of new resources. When it takes weeks or months to order and configure hardware, this can now be provided speedily through self-service portals and APIs.

Most managed cloud platforms also offer preconfigured environments and tools for popular development frameworks. This frees up developers to actually write code and not worry about infrastructure management, which would otherwise delay the process.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery

Organizations of any scale worry about business continuity in the event of disruptions. Managed cloud services generally offer disaster recovery and backup capabilities of a high class. Examples include the following: 

- Automatic data backup

- Disaster recoveries and replicated data across geographically dispersed locations

- Failover and load balancing across more than one data center

- Quick recovery of virtual machines and containers

For instance, these features can provide a level of redundancy that would be too costly for most organizations to implement directly, considering their scale.

Support for Hybrid and Multi-Cloud

While many organizations will adopt cloud-first strategies, most enterprises still operate on hybrid environments consisting of on-premises infrastructure, private clouds, and public clouds. Managed cloud services also offer much more in terms of tools and platforms built to support hybrid and multi-cloud architectures.

It includes the consolidation of single management consoles, one security policy, and easier data integration between different environments. Managed services can make it easier to simplify hybrid deployments and, hence enable organizations to optimize their overall IT infrastructure.

Environmental Sustainability

Due to the growing importance of green concerns, the energy efficiency of IT operations is under scrutiny. Compared with on-premises enterprise data centers, large cloud data centers operated by managed service providers usually achieve significantly better energy efficiency. For the above reasons, such efficiency is realized:

New cooling technologies

Renewable sources of energy

Resource optimization through virtualization and containerization.

This offloading of workloads to managed cloud services can often be initiated at the behest of an organization in pursuit of reducing its carbon footprint and aligning with the corporate goals for sustainability.

Conclusion

While the benefits of managed cloud services are numerous, they are not always the best fit for a given use case. An organization will need to determine if their particular needs are addressed by requirements such as data sovereignty, desired customization, and estimated long-term cost.

However, for many organizations, the factors of de-multiplexing, security, scalability, and access to state-of-the-art technologies justify choosing managed cloud services. As the theories behind cloud technologies evolve with time, it will be increasingly possible for managed services to help firms make digital transformation and business innovation a reality.