Businesses Aren’t Building Clouds Alone (MSPs, CSPs Required)

Grazed from TalkinCloud. Author: Editorial Staff.

In the last few years, businesses have gone from asking what the cloud is, to investigating how they can leverage the cloud to avoid costly on-premise hardware investments.

A recent IDG Enterprise study notes that two-thirds of IT professionals believe cloud computing is a significantly important enabler of business innovation. Midmarket and enterprise businesses, in particular, prefer private clouds – either on-premise or third-party hosted – because they provide greater manageability and control than hybrid or public clouds. As such, it is not surprising that the IDG study also found that private clouds currently dominate the IT landscape, with 24 percent of enterprises having adopted the model.
Cloud Challenges

Yet, while enterprises understand that they can gain tremendous returns from private cloud investments, the cost of building and sustaining clouds threatens to negate many of those gains. The IDG Enterprise study finds nearly 7 out of 10 enterprises are challenged by the need to evolve their skillsets to develop, implement and maintain private clouds. Just as the cost of maintaining on-premise infrastructure is too expensive, so too is the cost of professional staff to build, manage and maintain private and hosted cloud assets…

As such, we’re already seeing a shift in cloud computing in which businesses are turning to third-party cloud providers and managed service providers to deliver the administration and management of cloud assets. However, it’s shortsighted to think of clouds – private or otherwise – as simply infrastructure replacements, and many enterprises are starting to look at the cloud as a facilitator of application hosting and business capabilities development. What enterprises really want from cloud computing is revenue enhancement, which comes with the speed that only agile cloud infrastructures can deliver.
Where MSPs, CSPs Fit In

The next promise of cloud computing will not come from private, hybrid or public clouds, per se, but what enterprises can do with those cloud assets. Businesses – SMB to enterprise – will increasingly turn to solution providers (MSPs or CSPs) that can deliver infrastructure, application and workload automation. And just as these skills are in short supply on the end-user side, they’re in equally short supply in the channel.

How will the IT channel deliver these resources, professional skills and services? Through collaborative partnerships in which solution providers, professional cloud services firms like NetEnrich, and third-party software and hardware vendors work together on a kaleidoscope of capabilities that will provide net-new value to cloud subscribers.

Technology and market needs are evolving faster than enterprises’ and the channel’s ability to deliver value-add services. Only by working in complementary networks of skills, infrastructure and application capacity will the channel evolve to meet the dynamic and changing expectations of the enterprise cloud marketplace.