3 Reasons Why Partnering with a Good Service Provider Matters

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What’s your role as a Managed Services Provider (MSP)?

It’s to assist your clients in obtaining the IT services. Services that are essential if they are to survive and prosper in today’s technology-saturated business environment.

Accomplishing that goal requires more than just fulfilling client requests for specific services. The best MSPs stay on top of developing trends in the IT marketplace, and use that expertise to proactively guide customers toward an IT infrastructure that can take them where they need to go, both now and in the future.

And in today’s world, where they mostly need to go is the cloud.

Not only large enterprises, but also small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) are moving their IT operations into the cloud in ever greater numbers. In fact, according to the SolarWinds IT Trends Report 2017, 95 percent of the IT professionals surveyed indicated that they had “migrated critical applications and IT infrastructure to the cloud over the past year.” And nowhere is that movement to the cloud more strategic than in the area of data storage.

Sign up for our webinar on June 7th “Why Service Providers Love Zadara Enterprise Cloud Storage” to learn more.  

Data Storage Is a Primary Concern For Both MSPs and Their Clients

In a recent survey involving more than 1,200 senior IT decision makers, a majority of respondents name storage as their #1 worry. With the amount of data companies handle growing at exponential rates, meeting increased capacity demands by simply adding more storage hardware has become prohibitively expensive. Companies that have entrusted management of their IT infrastructure to an MSP will rightly look to that partner for help in finding ways to meet this continually increasing demand for storage in a cost effective way.

 

MSPs Face Even Greater Storage Pressures Than Their Clients

Many MSPs use their own data centers in providing IT services to clients, and the requirements they face are even more stringent. The MSP becomes legally liable for meeting the uptime standard guaranteed in a SLA (Service Level Agreement). Failure to do so can result not only in financial penalties, but also in the loss of a customer. As a result, MSPs that provide storage services through their in-house data centers are often forced to over-provision to ensure they’ll never be caught with inadequate capacity to meet customer demand. MSPs may also be required to provide staff on a 24/7 basis to monitor the customer’s storage infrastructure and fix problems as they arise.

Because of issues such as these, many MSPs are finding it increasingly difficult to provide cost-effective enterprise-level storage services on their own.

 

How Partnering With a Good Cloud Storage Provider Changes the Game

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The good news for MSPs is that expert help in meeting storage challenges is available. By joining forces with a cloud-based storage-as-a-service (STaaS) provider, the issues that have made data storage such a point of pain for both MSPs and their customers can be dealt with effectively.

MSPs that partner with a top-notch STaaS vendor, like Zadara Storage, can offer their clients enterprise class storage services for a monthly fee. Storage can be based in the public cloud, in an on-site private cloud, or both. There’s no need for either the MSP or the customer to ever purchase storage hardware, or to devote operating funds and staff to monitoring, maintaining, and upgrading storage units. The STaaS provider performs all those functions as an integral part of its service.

One of the most important features of STaaS solutions is elastic scaling. Whenever a client’s capacity needs grow or diminish, a solution like Zadara’s can automatically and almost instantaneously scale up or down to accommodate demand. In either case, the customer pays only for the amount of storage they actually use.

With a good STaaS vendor, MSPs avoid the necessity of having storage experts on staff and available 24/7 to support their clients. A provider like Zadara will remotely monitor the client’s storage infrastructure, often catching and correcting problems before the client, or the MSP, becomes aware of them. And a first class STaaS provider will also take the responsibility to meet stringent SLA commitments. Zadara’s service, for example, comes with a 100 percent uptime SLA guarantee.

 

Having the Right Partner Can Make All the Difference

 

By partnering with a top notch STaaS provider like Zadara, MSPs can offer their customers the highest level of storage services at an affordable cost.

Zadara is committed to working with (and not around) its MSP partners to supply first-class storage services to customers. The MSP remains the point of contact with their clients, and need never worry that Zadara will attempt to supplant them in that relationship. That kind of partnership is a winning proposition for both parties.

If you would like to explore how partnering with a first-class STaaS provider like Zadara can be a game changer for your company, please read the case study: VPSA in the Cloud.

Zadara Team

Zadara Team

Since 2011, Zadara’s Edge Cloud Platform (ZCP) simplifies operational complexity through automated, end-to-end provisioning of compute, storage and network resources.

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