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.
