An IT Support Blog from London

As with all other industries, the Managed Services Provider (MSP) sector faces numerous challenges. Coming out of the pandemic, 64% of MSPs have managed to stay competitive, while the rest lagged behind. Still, there’s fierce competition and changing client expectations to deal with. That’s why MSPs need to come up with a framework that’s sustainable and cost-effective for both the customer and their business.

Given these demands, MSPs are driven to leverage the wide availability of tech solutions and automation tools. Using the ‘think cloud’ mantra, MSPs are using the various SaaS solutions out there to keep up with technology adoption, all while efficiently managing integrations, tools, people, and processes.

In this article, we'll explore 5 ways that MSPs can level up their services with SaaS solutions. We'll also put particular focus on how SaaS and automation can make IT support smoother so it contributes to the overall business operations. But first, let’s refresh our knowledge on cloud technologies.

Cloud adoption has been fast on the rise for years now. At least 94% of businesses are using cloud solutions to a certain extent, with the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report revealing that more organisations are embracing multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies.

Going hybrid is a prudent strategy for many enterprises. The benefits of the cloud are well-documented, but keeping most data and some applications in an on-premise data centre is a security practice fitting for many companies. The ideal solution? A hybrid cloud that offers the best of both worlds.

In this blog post, we offer a clear definition of what a hybrid cloud is and its importance. We also explain the challenges that come with a hybrid environment, and discuss some important aspects to hybrid cloud management.

The power of cloud computing has been making transformative changes in many organisations across all industries. Access to cloud solutions have paved the way for businesses to achieve scalability and flexibility in a timely and cost-effective manner, allowing them to innovate and grow with remarkable agility.

As cloud environments meet more intricate and greater business demands however, managing the complexities of cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure has proven to be a daunting challenge for many companies especially larger enterprises. Cloud managed services have thus, stepped into the picture to address this growing concern of many organisations.

Now that most organisations are all caught up and aboard the cloud computing train, the focus has now shifted to discovering and unlocking the promised value of the cloud. While the cloud’s elasticity and agility have provided enterprise-grade IT infrastructure to smaller businesses without incurring heavy capital expenditures, it has also led to significant waste of resources and difficulty in controlling cloud spending.

A McKinsey Digital article reveals that a whopping 80% of companies find it challenging to manage cloud spend. Further, the Anodot 2022 State of Cloud Cost survey reports that 49% of businesses struggle with cloud costs. This scenario is certainly not what enterprises anticipated when they decided to embark on the cloud journey. Fortunately, there’s a sound approach to managing costs so you can maximise your cloud solutions; it’s called cloud cost optimisation.

If your organisation has migrated to the cloud, then good for you. Depending on the extent of your utilisation of cloud solutions, you would have already saved your business valuable time, manpower, and money. As enterprises may discover at some point, however, there are also some challenges to embracing cloud computing. One of these is to understand exactly where your cloud spend is going. To avoid inefficiency and wastefulness, it’s important to use cloud resources in the right way by applying cloud cost optimisation.

The rise of virtual computing environments and the constant challenge to lower operating costs have spurred the demand for thin clients. From its current 2022 valuation of USD 1.19 billion, the global thin client market is expected to reach USD 1.32 billion by 2030, or an annual growth rate of 2.8%.

What has further aided the increased usage of thin clients is the advancement of technologies such as faster broadband networks, more powerful servers, cheaper storage, and a host of cloud solutions to cater to the enterprise’s every need. In this blog post, we discuss what a thin client is, what its advantages are, and the use cases that would make it better over the PC.

As we head further into the digital era, the need for cyber security has never been more apparent. Organisations are moving many of their business applications and data into the cloud, making the cloud a prime target for cyber criminals and threat actors. If you’re not yet paying extra attention to your cloud security, then it’s high time you did.

Cloud Security Defined

Cloud security is a discipline of cybersecurity that focuses primarily on protecting the cloud. Also referred to as cloud computing security, it is the collection of security policies, guidelines, procedures and technologies designed to work together to secure cloud-based applications and systems.

Enterprises of all sizes are now paying more attention to cloud security with the increased reliance on a cloud environment. Not only are business data, customer information, and other valuable data assets being entrusted to cloud storage, but the ‘attack surface’ of cyber threats has also significantly expanded with employees using a variety of smart devices as they work from anywhere.

The adoption of remote work has never been as rushed as in the last couple of years, fueled by the global crisis that was COVID-19 and the movement limitations it brought about. Amidst all the adjustments that businesses have had to make to cope with the situation, Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) and related cloud solutions paved the way in helping organisations successfully shift to a remote workforce.

The widespread adoption of cloud computing has added a lot of acronyms into our vocabulary, the most common of which are SaaS, PaaS, and IaaS. Indeed, the era has ushered in cloud solutions that deliver software, platform, and infrastructure to consumers and businesses on an on-demand, pay-as-you-go basis.

Now here’s an added cloud computing offering (and another acronym) that you may not be as familiar with but one that many organisations are already benefiting from: Desktop-as-a-Service or DaaS.

Cloud computing, the delivery of on-demand computing services over the internet, has revolutionised the way businesses operate across many industries. Cloud storage is one of its most commonly-used applications. This storage method offers many benefits that can prove to be very advantageous for every company that uses it.

Numerous organisations have already switched to the cloud for their storage needs, and it’s only a matter of time before the majority of all data of most enterprises will be stored in the cloud.