IT Documentation: Do it for Your Techs!

Documentation isn’t boring. That’s right, you heard it here first. It isn’t merely ‘paperwork.’ Nor is it an inconvenience or a necessary evil, something that MSPs have to ‘put up with.’ At least, it doesn’t have to be. Not if you look at it from the right angle.

In essence, documentation is writing things down. And, in the business world, it is an expression of and means to greater operational maturity. In other words, robust documentation practices not only reflect, but reinforce mature business practices.

And just what might those be? That one’s easy—mature business practices are the kind that make your MSP money! However you feel about documentation, the fact remains: An effective documentation management strategy can save your MSP tons of time and money.

In this, the first of a series of blog posts devoted to documentation, we will consider how documentation makes your technicians’ work lives easier and more productive. But before we dive into that topic, a few general remarks on what makes documentation such a powerful business tool …

Documentation is Paying Attention

Documentation facilitates an honesty that comes only from truly paying attention. When your IT business’s SOPs exist mostly in your head (and perhaps the heads of your more experienced techs), they can seem a lot more efficient and effective than they really are. But writing them down, and then, reading what you’ve written … well, that entire process has a way of clearing away the fog of ego and revealing the truth—the good, the bad, and the ugly. Documenting your business means really looking at it.

Getting Your Technicians on Board

MSP owners face a distinct challenge when it comes to implementing more and better documentation protocols at their companies. Technicians aren’t, generally speaking, huge fans of documentation. So, pushing a pro-documentation agenda can make you look like the ‘bad guy.’ This is a serious issue, because no matter how slick and elegant your documentation protocols are, without your technicians’ buy-in, they’re just a bunch of rules.

Documentation protocols become documentation practices when the people in your company take them seriously. But how are you supposed to convince your MSP employees that documentation isn’t a bitter pill to swallow, but something to relish?

The solution to the problem of how to instill a documentation culture at your MSP isn’t itself documented. There’s no algorithm you can follow for garnering employee support and enthusiasm. How you go about doing it is largely idiosyncratic. You know your employees and your management style (and if you don’t, this is a wake-up call: get to know yourself ASAP!). Trust your instincts and be the leader you’re comfortable being.

That said, here are two pieces of general advice on how to get your techs to start (and not stop) practicing good documentation hygiene.

1. Be the change …

First piece of advice: be the change you want to see in your MSP. Attitude is contagious. As an MSP owner, what you think and feel about documentation will influence what your employees think and feel about documentation.

“Influence”—not “determine”; you can’t force your technicians to get excited about documentation, but you can do your part to chip away at their biases and their knee-jerk negative reactions. A positive attitude is immeasurably helpful here.

So, consciously foster in your own mind a favorable conception of documentation (e.g., view it as a ‘slick and modern tool capable of driving your MSP’s efficiency through the roof’ or as a ‘thoughtful and detail-oriented business practice that both reflects and reinforces operational maturity’).

2. Don’t force. Motivate …

Second piece of advice: If you frame your documentation conversation in terms of ‘you forcing your techs to do something they don’t want to do,’ you’re shooting yourself in the foot at the beginning of the race—using the starting gun! In business (and in life) forcing people to do things doesn’t work nearly as well as motivating people to do things.

When it comes to implementing a robust documentation culture at your MSP, you don’t want your techs’ obedience; you want their engagement. Without their active, willing involvement, you simply cannot sustain healthy documentation practices.

That’s why some MSPs are turning to gamification to incentivize documentation for technicians. Gamifying documentation makes it fun—well, more fun—and can help you get the ball rolling. But as an MSP owner, you shouldn’t have to rely too heavily on ‘tricks’ like gamification to motivate your techs to follow documentation protocols. That’s because of one simple truth:

Your techs are probably the people in your company who will benefit the most from a mature documentation management strategy. Your job is to convey this to them without hitting them over the head with it. Try working the following points into your conversation …

Why Your Techs Should Love Documentation (or At Least Hate it Less)

When your MSP gets serious about documentation—not only doing it, but doing it the right way—your techs will be able to do their jobs more easily, more efficiently, and just plain better. To be more specific, a solid documentation strategy can help your hardworking technicians …

• Stop having to reinvent the wheel all the time. Without a mature documentation system in place, your MSP’s techs will often have to reinvent the wheel when faced with a new IT issue or customer. Starting from scratch is hard, time-consuming, and prone to human error. But when your techs have a rich service database to consult—clearly written SOPs and detailed ticket notes—they never have to reinvent the wheel to solve a customer’s IT issue. The amount of time this will save your MSP is truly monumental.

• Not have to rely on their fallible brains so much. Written SOPs provide your techs with convenient checklists. Checklists have been used by pilots and surgeons for decades and with great success. The reason is simple: human beings are fallible, and we’re especially fallible when carrying out complex tasks in high pressure situations. So, when you give your techs checklists to carry out their service duties, you’re not implying that their jobs are easy or mechanical; on the contrary, you’re recognizing the inherent difficulty and complexity of their work. Like surgeons and pilots, IT techs ought to offload some cognitive work onto a checklist in order to save their brainpower for the more nuanced aspects of their job—the things that can’t be captured by a list.

• Make customers happy (or less angry, at least). Here’s a scenario: Say a tech goes out to lunch, and a customer whom that tech was helping calls your MSP’s service desk. Here’s what happens when your company has good documentation protocols in place: Another one of your techs can take the call, refer to their colleague’s ticket notes, and pick up right where that colleague left off. This is obviously highly efficient, and it also means that the tech won’t have to ask the customer a bunch of things that their lunch-eating colleague already asked, during the initial call. Why is this important? Because the last thing—the last thing—a frustrated customer wants to do is repeat themselves.

• Spend less time and energy on training new hires. This is a big one. When you hire a new technician, there’s a lot that person needs to learn in order to become a productive member of your company. Without detailed documents that explain how they’re supposed to do their job (internal documentation), the task of training them falls entirely on your more experienced techs. But with such documents, new hires can largely train themselves, leaving your experienced techs more time to tackle the sophisticated IT issues you pay them to deal with. This makes everyone happier, but also, it saves you money—in-person training is costly!

• Avoid awkward stalemates with customers. Sometimes customers are unhappy with the IT service your MSP provided them. Sometimes these customers lodge formal complaints. Sometimes these complaints are … aggressive. When this happens, and there isn’t sufficient documentation of the services received, it’s your word against theirs, your tech’s word against the customer’s. Sure, the customer’s always right—but you don’t want to throw your tech under the bus, or accept fault without knowing what really happened. Dealing with an upset customer is never going to be fun, but documentation gives you something solid to point to when things get testy and turbulent, and it allows for greater overall transparency and accountability in your business culture.

At the end of the day, proper documentation practices are geared towards one thing: making it easier for your techs to access the critical IT info required to carry out their duties. It takes time to build a streamlined, centralized, and comprehensive documentation platform, but the amount of time such a platform saves your MSP in the long run is truly on a different order of magnitude.

IT Glue: Helping You Fight Information Sprawl

Building a productive documentation culture at your MSP is hard work, and it takes time. As your MSP grows, so too does the amount of information flowing through your business. Organizing and managing all that info with proper documentation procedures, and in a way that boosts revenue and improves workflow, can feel daunting—to say the least!

IT Glue is an industry-leading, SOC-2 compliant documentation software that allows MSPs of all sizes to develop and maintain a robust and cost-effective documentation management strategy. If you’re the owner of a growing MSP and you want to get serious about documentation, but you don’t know where to start, start with IT Glue.

Learn more about IT Glue’s suite of features and robust integrations to see why thousands of MSPs have chosen IT Glue for all of their documentation needs.

Microsoft Azure and What it Means for Your Business

Microsoft Azure has made waves in the virtualization and cloud computing space since its inception. It’s not the only player in the game, but it has quickly become one of the biggest and one of the best for many small and medium businesses. Azure rivals Amazon’s AWS offering in terms of scalability and scope, but occupies a different market space in some respects.

Companies or entities who primarily use Microsoft products will benefit from looking into Azure. If you run an MSP, this is going to be most of your clients. Most businesses leverage Microsoft products in some capacity, so there are advantages for many technical and non-technical companies in general. Licensing costs can eat the financial advantage some platforms have over Azure.

The purpose of this article is to explain the very basics of Microsoft Azure, what makes cloud computing work, and how it can be a boon to a business. This document will be somewhat technical, but parts of it will be accessible to end-users and clients to help explain some of the core concepts in a way that makes sense. Let’s go over cloud computing, cloud infrastructure and virtualization, Windows virtual desktop, serverless computing and more, the general cost, and what resellers offer.

Cloud Computing in a Nutshell

Almost everyone has heard of the cloud at this point. It’s not even correct to say that the cloud is the future; the cloud is essential for scalability. The cloud is a case study in the economics of scale in computing. The cloud is a culmination of computing knowledge, computing abilities, and the hardware and bandwidth to make it all work.

Pretty much anything you can think of in standard computing exists in the cloud. If you need a server, you can virtualize one. If you need a data store, you can spin one up. As long as it is something which can be done conventionally, there’s probably a cloud provider which does it. The joke in IT is that the cloud is just someone else’s computer, which while cynical, isn’t wrong either.

Cloud computing is just someone else abstracting the data center infrastructure required to run different infrastructures or systems into an offering which plays off of their scale. You’re paying a little more regularly to not have to deal with matching CPU architectures, balancing racks, and having to maintain equipment. Someone else handles that so you get to pay for exactly what you need and so you can scale without having to deal with the hassle. You trade risk for an amortized and averaged out cost. We’ll get more into these factors with the cost impact section.

You can think of it as looking to rent for a bit more per month than you’d pay to own in exchange for a less unpredictable experience and without having the same degree of maintenance. When something breaks, it’s the owners problem to fix it. The cloud hosting provider is responsible for maintaining the infrastructure, the backend that lets you work, and resolving internal issues. Tasks that used to take a whole team to maintain can be relegated to a single individual or even outsourced to an MSP to manage since the vendor handles the more painful parts.

Cloud Infrastructure and Virtualization

While most cloud platforms started with basic virtualization, they had to be able to adapt to and incorporate multiple types of infrastructure to be effective. Eventually the focus shifted from just being able to run “stuff” in the cloud to the cloud having to become an extension of your computing infrastructure. To put it simply, to have SaaS, you have to build the pieces which can allow PaaS, IaaS, etc. which can be repackage and resold as XaaS. Azure has this entire angle nailed, arguably better than basically any other provider (for most use cases).

Basics of Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure

Feel free to skip this section if you’re already familiar with virtualization and cloud infrastructure in general.

Virtualization is the practice of running the equivalent of a specific computer system on a virtual machine (VM). Instead of installing the OS onto a physical computer, you install it into a controlled subsystem (which emulates a physical machine) running on a hypervisor. The hypervisor (HV) is the system which runs the operating system which maintains the virtual machine and the internal infrastructure to make it functional, but its health is independent of its virtual machines. If a virtual machine has an issue, the hypervisor shouldn’t be impacted (there are exceptions, ring -1 exploits, etc., but those are far beyond the scope of this article).

A VM should be a compartmentalization of the features it is supposed to abstract. The fewer features you have, the fewer moving pieces there are, and the less likely it is for something to go wrong. The HV shouldn’t run essential roles for a domain or similar (in most cases), and the individual VM’s can afford to do less. With a hardware setup, you have a limit based on the hardware, the cloud tends to be infinite for all practical intents and purposes.

To make a VM useful, there has to be infrastructure in place to make it function. The idea to virtualize came first, but the infrastructure is what makes it all work. You have to handle VPNs, routing, network setups, etc. to make a virtualized machine do anything. The work had been done, so it was only natural to expand the offerings to do more and more as it became more practical and refined.

The Advantage of Azure with Virtualization and Cloud Infrastructure

The easiest way to understand this growth is to look at the question: “Why do companies use virtualization?” Virtualization is a way to reduce risk and (usually) costs; you trade absolute efficiency for something which is less prone to incidents and accidents, but is easier to maintain. The easier the process, the easier the client will be sold on the whole system. This is the angle Azure has taken in general.

Azure isn’t the cheapest provider by any stretch, but they’re one of the easiest to migrate to (for Microsoft solutions), and one of the easiest to get going with. The basic Azure console is easy enough the average technician can figure it out with a little help from Google (mainly for differences between options). Resellers make it even easier by restricting options while simplifying controls.

Microsoft Azure is basically a one stop shop for setting up a virtualized environment. You can set up VM’s, set up the infrastructure they need, and so much more. Data stores, VLANs, etc. are all trivial to get working with Azure. Networking setup is a matter of clicking the right things instead of handling firewall appliances like some older providers. Azure even offers backups, advanced desktop options (DaaS), etc. If you can do it in a data center or with standard hardware, you can do it with Azure.

Windows Virtual Desktop

Azure’s primary Desktop as a Service (DaaS) solution is Windows Virtual Desktop. It is the spiritual successor to traditional terminal servers allowing each individual use to have their environment imaged out of a standard base system. You pick the applications and similar, the rest is handled by the system itself.

Windows Virtual Desktop allows you to cut down on resources for what kind of system you or your clients need to work. Pretty much any basic laptop or desktop is going to be good enough to work off of no matter what the client needs to do. You get the advantages of a terminal server environment without having the resources shared (unless you want to). Most services offering this type of virtual desktop system are going to use Azure as the backend due to licensing costs among other factors.

Windows Virtual Desktop is the culmination of all of the advanced features of Azure distilled into an offering. The process appears completely transparent from the infrastructure down to the end-user’s login. It takes the pain away from IT departments and MSPs while offering an improved user experience which can be quite cost effective.

Serverless Computing and More

Azure leverages the cloud to provide even more types of offerings which fit in where standard cloud offerings don’t. Serverless computing isn’t anything new, but it is much easier with platforms like Azure. Consumer AI and other offerings exist as well which can be used to build all sorts of new technologies, all in the same place.

Serverless computing is the practice of abstracting a program beyond the confines of where it will run. The system itself isn’t lacking of a server, but the design process and implementation is; you think outside of the traditional paradigm of being at the whims of the operating system and local elements in favor of using standard interfaces and abstract implementations of traditional operating system functions. Basically, your programmers are focused on programming and an authority (for the system employed) and the vendor (where it is hosted) maintains the overall security and other nuts and bolts for the rest of the process.

Azure isn’t just a platform for developing an IT infrastructure, but it can serve as a way to run applications and services, and tie them all together as necessary. If you’re dealing with .NET or C#, they’re one of the best places to move these applications. The initial migration can be a little painful, but the reduction in maintenance (especially with a Windows environment) is worth the cost.

Microsoft Azure Cost

Azure tends to be one of the more expensive cloud providers for many use cases, but it makes up for that cost with what it offers. When you’re calculating the cost of a cloud provider, you can’t just look at the cost of equipment versus the cost of the cloud. What all goes into the instantiation, maintenance, and service of your infrastructure?

The Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) is what really matters when shopping these solutions. For some IT shops, this means running everything on Azure just won’t make sense internally, and that’s okay. For most other companies which use Microsoft products, Azure has a lot to offer. The biggest issue with looking at Azure is figuring out how to compare the apples and oranges with traditional offerings.

Azure works on a basis of cost of computing. The more you use it, the more it costs. For virtual desktop environments, you can look at their estimates to get an idea of what it takes to run a virtual desktop environment. They offer a standard calculator as well to get an idea of what you’re looking at for each item. Keep in mind though, licensing and similar is included with most offerings.

How much does it cost you to set up and maintain a server? What happens when a drive blows or the power surges? How do you back it all up? How many people do you or your client keep on the payroll just to do basic administration of the system? Who do you have on call, and how much do they cost to support it around the clock? What is the cost of down time, and how long does it take you to get back up? Are these resources split between multiple departments or tasks which have their own unpredictability?

The deeper you dig, the more favorable the cloud is going to be for most business purposes. The cloud functions on the economy of scale, and while a huge MSP with thousands and thousands of endpoints might be able to compete, the profit margin to liability ratio may not be worth it. As cloud providers get bigger and better, the thin margins on cloud computing services get thinner for smaller shops.

Resellers

Resellers such as Nerdio and Crayon work to make administering Azure easier without necessarily costing more. They use their volume to get competitive rates which allows them to help you help your client or yourself. Azure offers so many offerings it can feel daunting without someone to show you what you need first.

Nerdio dives deeper into Azure and combines their expertise with the raw backend that Azure provides. They offer IaaS, DaaS, and ITaaS (among other things). You’re paying a bit more to get assistance doing the harder parts of Microsoft Azure. While Azure itself is straightforward, it can be overwhelming with the sheer volume of options and configurability it offers. Services like Nerdio aim to reduce the complexity for you and your client.

Crayon is similar to Nerdio in what they offer, but the devil is in the details and the implementations. Crayon can allow an MSP to offload many of the more mundane duties. The exact differences that make them each offer unique value is a bit outside the scope for this article. We work with both since both are subtly different with their implementations and the other offerings they provide.

by Joseph Landes

Businesses of all sizes are looking to move their IT infrastructure to the cloud and the most important choice to make when doing so is finding a great IT provider who will have your best interests in mind on this journey. Promises will be made about capabilities and expertise, but it is important to keep your eye on three important things to ensure your Managed Services Provider is committed to helping you transform your IT infrastructure to the cloud.

Recommending Best in Class Products

Nothing else matters if a vendor’s product is not best-in-class and it is why so many vendors lose business in the competitive cloud ecosystem. There are too many other competitive solutions combined with somewhat low switching costs to settle for something that is not phenomenal and brings massive value to your business. When moving to the cloud, does the technology provider have a strong track record of performance? Do they have the infrastructure to scale with you as your company grows? A good sign that it is time to look elsewhere is if the product your partner is offering can’t pass a basic Proof of Concept or is just feature-poor relative to other comparable solutions. This is why I strongly recommend Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Azure as the core building blocks for any company’s initial foray into the cloud. No other company has invested so much into empowering businesses of all sizes to do more than Microsoft.

Adding Value to Your Business

My former CEO of Microsoft, Satya Nadella, often says that a company’s past success does not define or predict their future. That each day your partner needs to come in and continue to win your business anew. This lesson holds great relevance in the burgeoning cloud ecosystem with so many vendors, replacement options, and new technologies emerging daily. The day your partner started working with you is the day the clock started ticking on their need to constantly create value that accrues to your business. The technologies they choose must help position you as a thought leader in front of your customers. They need a clear Conditions of Satisfaction that defines their relationship with you and there needs to be regular check-ins to make sure your business is growing as result of the relationship.

Driving Down Your Cost

The cloud ecosystem is a competitive space. New technologies continue to emerge with even more powerful functionality than in months prior. Startups are being born by the hundred and thousands in the cloud and the need to maintain on-premises hardware in your office is a thing of the past. One would think that while the technology gets better, it would be more expensive to move the cloud. But it is quite the opposite! Business have increasingly been able to take advantage of economies of scale the large cloud providers like Microsoft has achieved in order to drive their costs down dramatically. In the past, a company would have to shell out many thousands of dollars to buy a server and amortize that cost over time. Now the model is consumption-based, and you only need to pay for what you use just like the electricity in your home. Moving to the cloud has a number of benefits for your business—and one significant one is driving down the cost of IT.

Moving one’s IT infrastructure to the cloud should be a near-term goal of every business. Putting off the decision to digitally transform your business could be costing you customers and making you less competitive. The time to move is now and we look forward to partnering with you on this exciting journey.

Joseph Landes is the Chief Revenue Officer of Nerdio — an exciting cloud startup in Chicago that helps Managed Service Providers build cloud practices in Microsoft Azure. Prior to joining Nerdio, he spent 23 years at Microsoft leading high-performing international sales and marketing teams and helping businesses of all sizes move to the cloud. He has travelled to 108 countries and is attempting to read every NY Times Notable Book ever published.

by Michael Pascuzzi

Digital transformation and innovation are becoming the keystone of modern business strategy. Automating facilities, collecting and analyzing more information, streamlining actions, and creating fresh ideas all require complex procedures. Complex doesn’t have to mean complicated. Moving processes to cloud architecture is viable and introduces high ROI possibilities. However, moving is not without cost.

Where Cloud Costs the Most

Business units often move to the cloud independent of the whole, obscuring the visibility of cloud resource consumption.
It’s become all too easy for anyone within the organization to buy or subscribe to cloud services and bypass centralized procurement or specified procurement policies. These bypasses lead to unforeseen, unplanned, unbudgeted spends.
When it comes to IaaS, IT spending can grow even faster. Without the right tools in place cloud resources are not optimized; servers can be running 24/7 unnecessarily, and expensive software can be left idling on forgotten servers. Compounding the issue vendors are not forthcoming when it comes to detailing which services have been run up and by whom — resulting in organizations being unable to attribute exact costs of IT spending to the right business unit.

Optimization of Cloud ROI

With visibility into what individual business units are using, the IT department can then begin the process of cost optimization. This type of optimization is a great way to understand end-user needs and preferences. It is also an opportunity to ask users about the value of the technology they have deployed and what problems it is solving. Knowing this can help other business units solve similar issues through better pan-enterprise deployment of such technologies.

Cloud Economics and Collaboration

It’s important to note that many business units require access to the same information. Individual copies throughout a business are redundant and potentially spreads misinformation; this is where cloud economics meets collaboration. Nowadays, it seems inconceivable, and almost lousy form, that co-workers would send hundreds of versions of the same word document across an organization via email. Instead, using a chat platform can help colleagues stay connected wherever they are, but everyone has to be on the same page. For many businesses, Office 365 provides software solutions to achieve these goals, allowing many users to edit a single document concurrently, in real-time via Word.

Still, many enterprises use on-premises Microsoft Office, and while that is a great tool, Office 365 takes collaboration to the next level. The Cloud Easy service from Crayon helps organizations migrate to Office 365 to achieve that next level.

Enhancing the collaboration efforts of your business can be impeded if you lack the appropriately skilled resources. The easy button to overcome such issues is to lean on an expert partner like Crayon to smooth your organization’s digital transformation journey to the cloud.

Interested in learning more about combating increases in IT spending? Don’t miss Crayon at The 20’s upcoming VISION Conference!

And to learn more about The 20 and how we can help your business, be sure to check us out here.

by Joseph Landes

As The 20 MSPs continue to evolve and build successful cloud practices in Microsoft Azure, one of the more frequent questions we receive at Nerdio is “How do I make money selling Azure?” MSPs should always be on the lookout for how Azure can improve their own business needs—namely decreased costs and higher gross profit margins. One of the best ways to do this is familiarizing yourself and deploying Azure Reserved Instances. Let’s talk about how that works.

The cost of Virtual Machines in Azure is the single biggest component of a typical MSP’s IT environment. Therefore, focusing on reducing this large consumption component is a great place to start. The savings are significant but carry a bit of complexity and need some up-front planning to take advantage of them.

Microsoft’s hyper-scale data center strategy has allowed the company to deploy many global regions at great cost to the company. As Azure adoption continues to rapidly grow, Microsoft needs to forecast demand in the various regions, which is far from trivial since public cloud is primarily advertised as a pay-as-you-go utility where you could run a VM one day and turn it off the next. To help with this forecasting challenge and to reward customers who are willing to commit to a certain amount of compute capacity in a specific region for an extended period, Microsoft introduced Reserved Instances (RIs). These RIs can save you from 20% to 57% relative to the list Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) price.

RIs are reservations of a specific type of compute capacity (i.e., VM family/series) in a specific geographic location (i.e., Azure region) for a predefined period (12 or 36 months). Depending on the VM family, duration of the reservation, and region, these RIs can save you from 20% to 57% relative to the list Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG) price. The trade-off is that you have to pre-pay for the reservation in advance. This is great news for MSPs because typical IT workloads they deploy in Azure on behalf of their customers are persistent and customers are generally open to making one or three-year commitments.

Let’s explore how these RIs work.

When you provision a VM in Azure, two billing meters start running: base compute and Windows Server license. The published PAYG rate includes both components and every plain, vanilla VM you power on will bill you for both. RIs stop the base compute meter.

RIs are purchased with a lump sum payment via the CSP program and are applied to your tenant or subscription. Any VM running inside of that subscription that “matches” the RI will have its base compute rate zeroed out on the next invoice. Remember that RIs are purchased on a per-VM-family, per-region basis. This means that it will only match to a VM or set of VMs if they are of the same family and in the same region as the RI.

With Instance Size Flexibility, Microsoft will automatically apply any reservations in the most advantageous way to reduce the bill – if the VMs are running in the same region and have the same family as the RI. Keep in mind that RIs are a billing concept. There is nothing that needs to be done on the VM itself to stop its base compute meter and utilize the reservation. Azure does that automatically upon issuance of the invoice.

What if you need to change your reservation from one VM family to another or move your VMs to another Azure region?

No problem! RIs can be exchanged without any fees or penalties. Any unused portion of an RI will be applied as a credit towards the purchase of a new RI for a different family, in a different region, or both.

What if you need to cancel a reservation?

This is also possible, but there is a cancellation fee. The cancellation fee is 12% of your purchase price. The unused portion of your reservation will be refunded to you minus the 12% cancellation fee. There are some limitations to this on an annual basis. For example, your cancellations cannot exceed $50,000 in a year.

Let’s stop and think about this for a minute from the perspective of an MSP. The worst-case scenario is a 12% cancellation fee on a reserved instance of a VM they may no longer need in the future. However, the savings is anywhere from 20% to 57%. Therefore, cash flow considerations aside it makes sense to reserve all VMs even if they may need to be exchanged (no fee) or cancelled later (12% fee).

What if your customer cancels your managed service agreement? You have three options:

1. If you have no other customers who can make use of Azure VMs you will be forced to cancel the reservations and pay the 12% early termination fee. However, remember that your savings should more than pay for the early termination fee even in this worst-case scenario.

2. If you have other customers or are bringing in new customers who can make use of reserved Azure VMs, but who need different types of VMs or need to be in a different region, then you would exchange your reservations – at no charge – and extend them to 12 or 36 months.

3. If you have other customers or are bringing in new customers who can make use of the reserved instances in the same region and same VM family, then there is nothing else for you to do. By setting the RIs to shared scope and having all your customers under one tenant with individual subscriptions, the RIs will just keep working for you and stopping the base compute meter on VMs.

What about cashflow?

You may be concerned that having to come up with 36 or even 12 months’ worth of Azure VM fees is a burden on your company. There are financing companies specializing in working with MSPs who will finance the purchase of Reserved Instances. This way you’ll get the benefit of the RI discount but keep the cash outlay monthly. There is obviously going to be a financing fee associated with this, but with savings of up to 57% it’s still worthwhile.

In summary, RIs or reservations are a significant lever to save up to 57% of compute costs, which is the single biggest cost component of an Azure IT environment, and dramatically increase your margins. They do require some advance planning, budgeting, and structuring of your Azure account the right way, but can significantly increase the profitability of your Azure practice. On top of the inherent savings you get with reservations, you may also get anywhere from a 2%-5% discount as a CSP Direct or CSP Reseller. As you can see, discounts start to stack up and free up margin to be used in better ways.

Interested in learning more? Don’t miss Nerdio at The 20’s upcoming VISION Conference!

Joseph Landes is the Chief Revenue Officer at Nerdio—a cloud company whose mission is to enable MSPs to build successful cloud practices in Microsoft Azure. He previous worked at Microsoft for 23 years leading high performing international sales and marketing teams. When not visiting MSPs you can find him trying to visit every country in the world or reading great literary fiction.

by Joseph Landes

Managed service providers (MSPs) in The 20 play a very important role in the adoption of cloud IT environments and the evolution of technology for the small and medium-size businesses they serve. This is particularly true with a powerful, yet complex, cloud environment like Microsoft Azure. SMBs look to MSPs in The 20 to expertly optimize itto fit their needs. But MSPs should also be on the lookout for how Azure can improve their own business needs—namely decreased costs and higher gross profit margins.

Here are five tips from Nerdio for The 20 members to optimize Azure costs and infrastructure to increase margins and make more money offering and reselling Azure.

1. Become a Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) Reseller

Becoming a CSP reseller makes it easier for MSPs to transact Azure. In addition, CSP resellers receive a discount off Azure list prices via a CSP distributor—typically large providers—and thereby increase margins. CSP resellers are also eligible for various incentives that Microsoft makes available to its CSPs based on growth objectives. These incentives are incremental to the discount received on Azure consumption and can be in the 10% range or more when added up. Reach out to an IT distributor and ask how to become a CSP reseller or visit Microsoft’s website for more detailed information.

2. Leverage Azure Reserved Instances

The cost of virtual machines (VMs) in Azure is the single most expensive component of a typical MSP’s IT environment. Reserved instances (RIs) are reservations of a specific type of compute capacity (i.e., VM family/series) in a specific geographic location (i.e., Azure region) for a predefined period of time (12 or 36 months). Depending on the above specifics, using RIs and reserving compute capacity ahead of time can save you from 20% to 57% relative to the list pay-as-you-go price. They do require some advance planning, budgeting, and structuring of your Azure account the right way, but can significantly increase the profitability of your Azure practice.

3. Capitalize on Azure Hybrid Usage

Microsoft has created a special entitlement called Azure Hybrid Usage (AHU) that allows MSPs to pay for Windows Server via another licensing program and not through Azure. Essentially, you can bring the Windows Server licenses you already paid for to the cloud for free. As a result, the Windows Server OS meter stops spinning. AHU is a benefit unique to Azure; you can’t bring your own Windows server license to other major cloud providers. Combining RIs with AHU and CSP software subscriptions can reduce the cost of VMs by up to 80%. It goes without saying that the margin impact to an MSP from such significant cost reductions cannot be overlooked.

4. Auto-scaling for Cost Optimization

The value proposition of Azure as a public cloud is its utility-like consumption billing model: Pay only for what you use. To do this, MSPs need a mechanism to know what compute is needed and when, and a system that automatically resizes workloads to fit the demand at any given time. This means that if a VM doesn’t need to be on, a system

needs to be in place to know it and act on it by shutting down the VM at the appropriate time and then turning it back on when it’s needed again.

Azure automation platforms do exactly this, as MSPs can set business hours for each VM and tell the system what to do with the VM outside of those hours: leave it alone, shut it down, or change it to something smaller. The system will then automatically execute these instructions, resizing the VM after the end of business hours and then prior to the start of the next business day.

5. Burstable VM Instances

B-series Azure VMs are known as “burstable” VMs. They are used for non-CPU-intensive workloads (for example, domain controllers and file servers) and cost about 50% of an equivalently sized D-series VM. Burstable VMs are cheaper because Azure imposes a quota on how much of the total CPU cores can be used. Every second that the VM is using less than its quota it is “banking credits” that can be used to burst up to the total available CPUs when needed. While bursting, the VM is consuming its banked credits. Once the credits run out, the VM’s CPU utilization is throttled down to a lower utilization quota.

As you can see, these tips provide multiple ways for MSPs in The 20 to optimize their Azure consumption and increase their profitability. Understanding these tips will help you reconfigure their Azure architecture, determine how much margin they can achieve, and recognize how to build a successful and profitable cloud practice in Azure. Nerdio’s automation platform allows the members of The 20 to achieve all of this and much more. Check us out at the upcoming VISION event or on our website at www.getnerdio.com.

Interested in learning more? Don’t miss Nerdio at The 20’s upcoming VISION Conference!

by Tom Darnall

Managing one print environment can be hard enough. Managing several at the same time can seem downright daunting. And for MSPs whose cost structures are highly sensitive to extra investment of time and resources, every second spent struggling with a print management issue can weigh heavily on the bottom line.

MSPs have another fundamental concern: customer satisfaction. Unlike an organization where print infrastructure is managed in-house, an MSP’s end users can decide to contract with another provider. That puts particular importance on retaining existing customers, which means that quality of service has to remain uncompromisingly high. Ongoing printing problems, even minor ones that might be tolerated elsewhere, can put an MSP out of business.

The catch is that, in addition to those challenges, MSPs also have a unique set of print-management requirements. Ideally, they want a single, uniform solution that allows them to deliver a core suite of services to customers while also providing a consistent management experience. Yet MSPs’ customers can have very different environments and a wide variety of printing needs, so any solution also has to be versatile enough to accommodate these disparities.

With that in mind, a print-management solution optimized for MSPs should meet the following criteria:

Powerful: Admins have access to a comprehensive suite of printer- and driver-management tools, including advanced features.

Intuitive: Profile settings as well as automated deployments and installations are easy to configure with granular precision.

Versatile: The solution integrates seamlessly with any environment without sacrificing reliability, functionality or ease of use.

Robust: Single points of failure and WAN dependencies are either reduced or eliminated completely, ensuring maximum uptime and uninterrupted printing.

Centralized: The MSP is able to fully manage the print environment for every customer, no matter how distributed, from a single pane of glass.

Consistent: The administrative experience is the same across the entire customer pool, regardless of differences in printer fleets or printing habits.

Streamlined: Administrative tasks are as efficient as possible and don’t require multiple interactions when one will do.

Scalable: The print-management solution effortlessly adapts as the customer’s print environment shrinks, expands or evolves over time.

Another consideration is that any print-management solution truly geared toward MSPs should also offer opportunities to add value. For example, one customer might want secure printing capabilities, whereas another wants to implement cross-platform mobile and BYOD printing. An MSP who’s able to provide this kind of added value with minimal physical infrastructure and low administrative overhead is going to be much more attractive to those customers.

PrinterLogic meets these demanding MSP criteria

Although traditional print-management solutions like print servers can’t fulfill all those demanding criteria, PrinterLogic’s enterprise print-management solutions are able to meet them without reservation.

PrinterLogic’s next-generation software uniquely combines the simplicity and reliability of direct-IP printing with the power of centralized management, enabling MSPs to manage the print environments of their entire customer pool from a single web-based console. This also gives PrinterLogic core capabilities like eliminating print servers, advanced printer deployments without the need for GPOs or scripts, self-service printer installations, and seamless integration alongside virtual solutions.

That’s not just theoretical. MSPs like Helion Automotive Technologies and Strata Information Technology have implemented PrinterLogic’s low-footprint, on-premises software solution for their customers in very different sectors. Helion, focuses on the automotive industry, supplying 650 car dealerships and their 28,000 employees with core IT services. Strata IT draws some of its largest customers from the healthcare industry.

Both MSPs saw a massive reduction in the time spent on print management after implementing PrinterLogic. Strata IT immediately experienced an estimated 50% drop in print-related support tickets, whereas Helion has leveraged PrinterLogic to cut 20 hours off each of its regular print-server migrations. The two MSPs also cited increased customer satisfaction as a result of their increased responsiveness, the reduced number of routine printing problems and the improved visibility into new areas of the print environment, such as consumable costs.

The next-gen features you expect from a next-gen solution

PrinterLogic also offers a SaaS counterpart. This zero-footprint, cloud-based solution offers feature parity with PrinterLogic’s proven on-premises software, giving MSPs and their customers the option of a flexible, enterprise-grade print-management solution that is infinitely scalable and incredibly cost-effective. Pioneer Technology is just one MSP that is using PrinterLogic’s SaaS solution to further its “cloud-first” philosophy and retain a competitive edge among peers in the banking, healthcare and retail industries.

And when it comes to adding value, PrinterLogic is able to provide native pull printing and mobile printing capabilities along with comprehensive print auditing tools. This kind of advanced functionality is increasingly sought after by organizations that are looking to harden their print security, provide tightly controlled but full-featured printing to their BYOD users, or gain insight into printing habits for the sake of cost-cutting and efficiency.

Tom Darnall recently joined the product team at PrinterLogic. He moved to Utah four years ago from Portland, where he held executive, product management and marketing positions at HP, Symantec, and other software firms. Tom received a B.A. in Communications from Brigham Young University and completed a summer executive MBA program at Stanford. Off the clock, Tom loves to explore the desert southwest, do landscape photography, and see live jazz in Las Vegas.

To learn more about The 20 and how we can help your business, be sure to check us out here.

by Patrick Sullivan, Contributor

By understanding what Workspace as a Service (WaaS) has to offer your End Customer, you can ensure that you’re reaching the customers who will benefit the most from the cloud. WaaS has so much to offer to so many. But, who is the ideal prospect?

So often we are asked, “What’s the best vertical for your solutions?” and, “What industries do you typically target?” or, “What type of companies can WaaS help?”

WaaS has practical applications across every vertical and just about every size business. This widespread versatility gives our partners the flexibility to develop their solution and messaging for the verticals they are already targeting, or to focus their marketing and sales as broadly as they want.

Using the Core-4 to Find the Ideal WaaS Customer.

When evaluating a prospective WaaS customer, look for the Core-4, which will help you zero in on the ideal cloud workspace customer. If the prospect answers “yes” to any of these four questions, then you have a winner:

1. Will you require a server refresh or other large IT project within the next 12 months?

Especially this year as Microsoft will sunset Windows 7 and Windows Server 2001/2008 R2 next January, so many companies are going to have to decide: expensive fork-lift upgrade, or easy and inexpensive transition into the cloud. End Customers hate IT projects, and with the cloud, you can eliminate the majority of them, saving them money and resources, and building your cloud business in the process.

2. Do you have employees who work remotely? Or does your business have multiple locations?

In today’s global business environment, companies are turning more and more to hiring remote staff, often outside their geographic footprint. Consider a company who hires Susan whose sole responsibility is to meet with customers; any time she spends in the office is just wasted time. Or, what about a business who needs Grant’s specific expertise, but he lives in Seattle, hundreds of miles away. In both cases, the staffers need the same accessibility as anyone working from the office. In both cases, the company’s IT needs to have control over their technology. Cloud Workspace simplifies both of these, making them an easy reality.

3. Do you have extensive security needs?

Think about a small bank, finance company or insurance agent. These are small companies, but they store and share sensitive client information. Security is paramount for them. At CloudJumper, we work incredibly hard to ensure our solutions are inherently secure. Additionally, we have a number of optional security add-ons that help your End Customers who need even more.

4. Is your company’s IT function larger than your IT team can support?

This can come out in a number of ways. Of course, if they have big security needs, but maybe, they also have numerous software apps to manage and maintain. They might have tight IT requirements for maintaining certifications or franchise agreements. Maybe they have a mix of OS and devices that all need to connect. The list here is endless, and no doubt your prospects will share items they simply would love to off-load to the cloud.

Always Has Been, and Still It Remains, it’s the Core-4

These are the four prospect characteristics that so easily translate into a sale, and they always have in the 20 years we have been providing a WaaS solution. You will find them in businesses across every industry, every vertical, every part of the world. Understand them, recognize them, and the sale is yours! It’s just a natural fit.

By understanding the ideal WaaS customer, you will more easily grow your business in the cloud, and boost your sales, profits and the stickiness of your customer base. Especially as you are just starting to build your cloud business, start with the Core-4. Soon, you’ll find yourself supporting your customers in ways no on-prem server farm can handle.

Patrick Sullivan is the Channel Sales Manager for CloudJumper who uses his cloud expertise and business acumen to guide MSPs as they create and grow their companies in the cloud. His support helps them build an IT cloud solution that saves their end customers money, time and hassle. Patrick has been with CloudJumper since June 2015 and has been very successful working helping his partners build their businesses in the cloud. Prior to joining CloudJumper, he honed his business development skills working in the equipment finance industry for more than 8 years. In 2005, Patrick graduated from New Hampshire University with Bachelor of Science in Business Administration.