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Moving your customers from on-site IT infrastructure to managed cloud services is more than just a technical upgrade. That’s not what really matters to them. For your customers, moving to a managed cloud means they get to upgrade their most critical business workflows.

Some businesses already see this advantage and are making the move on their own. Gartner is now forecasting an increase in public cloud provider revenue of 17.5% in 2019 over the previous year, with similar rates for private and hybrid services. The largest growth sector in their report being Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) options. The demand is out there.

But, some of your customers probably won’t immediately see the advantage. And explaining the benefits to them can be challenging. So let’s take a look at what matters most for your clients: the top 10 ways they can leverage managed cloud services to grow their business.
 

1) Stabilize IT Costs

There’s no other way to put it: IT infrastructure is expensive. And right from the planning phase too. There’s a lot of vendor consulting and design that goes into the deployment phase, which is why they’ve hired you! They need someone to take care of that, in addition to the ongoing maintenance and support.

Cost is a pain point for every IT service customer. So show them how shifting to an IaaS model lets them distribute their infrastructure costs more evenly and predictably month-to-month.

 

2) Seamless Business Continuity

The distributed nature of cloud services makes them particularly well-suited answers to the challenges of business continuity planning. Archiving, real-time backups, and server replications are much simpler in a self-contained cloud network. And there’s a whole range of day-to-day costs that are mitigated when you can offer customers 99.999% uptime.

However, emergency preparedness can sometimes be a hard sell to customers who have never experienced a critical outage. A helpful exercise can be having them walk through all the processes they can’t do when their servers are down. Order fulfillment, marketing, or even just emailing. Then have them total up those estimated costs in lost productivity.

 

3) Tighter IT Security

Shifting infrastructure to a managed cloud environment means your customers also buy into a large suite of security and protection tools. Enterprise-grade antivirus and intrusion detection tools monitor your small business customers’ assets. And if a server is compromised, it can easily be sandboxed for on-demand analysis, without putting the rest of your customers’ assets at risk.

This is often an easier sell than emergency preparedness. Customers usually appreciate that their data is protected by security normally only available to corporations with ten times their IT budget.

 

4) Powerful Business Intelligence

With capacity for large datasets and on-demand data warehousing, cloud storage may be the ideal environment for the latest business analytics. Much like your customers gain access to enterprise security tools, with managed cloud service they also get analytics and BI tools beyond their normal capabilities.

 

For example, capacity planning gets a whole lot easier when virtually unlimited capacity is an option! And the flexible, dynamic storage systems underlying both public clouds like Microsoft Azure, and private clouds like Sherweb’s Performance Cloud, offer more powerful data placement strategies and reporting options.

 

5) More Adaptability

Is your customer on the fence about how to handle a new product launch? Despite that improved capacity planning, are they still unsure of how to proceed? If you’re able to spin up new test environments and app servers almost instantly, you become the key player around whom their future growth plan revolves. That’s a good place to be!

 

6) Better Scalability

Do you have customers who conduct seasonal business? Is their existing on premise infrastructure dangerously close to capacity every time they hit one of those seasonal upticks? What better way to help them literally grow their capabilities than to provide temporary storage or an RDP server for temp workers to use on-demand.

You can make the point to customers that when they migrate to a managed cloud environment they don’t need to pay to keep those seasonal resources on standby year round. They simply ask you to spin up the resources they need as their busy season approaches, then wind them back down and get them off the books when they’re done.

 

7) Centralization for Better Management

Migrating your customers to a managed cloud service puts much of their infrastructure, data, and digital assets in one place. This is a big selling point for many customers because of the efficiencies gained—both yours and theirs—when everything is under one roof. Your customers can implement their resource planning strategies, and just conduct their day-to-day operations, that much faster once everything is migrated to a single, central cloud platform.

 

8) Economies of Scale

Using managed cloud services lets small and medium businesses purchase a slice of enterprise-scale IT resources at just the size and cost that they need. Everything we’ve touched on here: analytics, security tools, big data storage, archiving, gives customers the tools to punch above their weight in the marketplace, and go toe to toe with their much larger rivals.

 

9) Superior Future Proofing

When their IT resources are in a managed cloud, your customers’ data and applications will always be running on the most up-to-date platforms. Having the hard conversation about lifecycle replacements is a thing of the past. And they don’t have to worry about downtime for patching or OS upgrades. There’s a dedicated team of engineers who take care of that on the fly, in the background, as needed.

 

10) Expertise On-Demand

An IaaS model offers more than just technology. Your customers get full-time industry expert IT staff at every single position on their new, virtual infrastructure team. That gives them the knowledge and experience they need to power their business’s growth.

 

Final Thoughts

When you migrate your customers to managed cloud services you give them access to IT tools normally only available to the largest enterprises in the world. And through Sherweb you also get access to network and cloud security experts round-the-clock to help your customers get the most out of their new infrastructure. We’ve honed our expertise over thousands of successful migrations. Everything from simple lift and shifts up to complex private cloud deployments.

This service and support does more than just help your customers grow. It levels the playing field for them, letting them go toe-to-toe with anyone in their industry. Managed cloud services help your customers take on their enterprise rivals by letting them become enterprise businesses on-demand.

When you’re ready to learn more, contact our cloud experts to see how Sherweb can help your IaaS offering.

Written by The Sherweb Team Collaborators @ Sherweb