No two ways about it—Azure can seem scary. There’s disquieting reputation that keeps most managed service providers (MSPs) from dipping their toes in the waters; they’re afraid they’ll be swallowed by a towering tsunami of complex infrastructure almost immediately. Some IT business owners might have a vague idea they’re missing out, but between everyday tasks always taking priority and risks associated with taking the leap, where do you even start?
You start right here, with the Azure Insight Series. The goal is simple enough: improve your bottom line and make your clients happier!
In the first instalment of this series, we’re introducing Nerdio: a get-it-done optimization tool for Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) activities that will simplify your life, from deployment to pricing to management.
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The four horsemen of the Azure apocalypse
- Complexity: It’s daunting to figure out how to go build an Azure practice. There are too many options to begin with— which ones do you use and when? The paralysis of abundance is almost a detriment.
- Risk: If you don’t do it right, all the time and energy you invest will amount to nothing. The risk of failure is simply too high for many. Forget about scalability and repeatability if the basics don’t work!
- Cost: What if you need to hire more key people to oversee the whole operation? How do you even establish the desired profits when moving from a traditional model to a consumption model? No business can function without billing that’s at least somewhat forecastable.
- Inertia: Many MSPs are used to doing things the way they’ve always done them. They know their current business model, they know it works, it got them this far. Why change a winning formula?
Nerdio to the rescue
You don’t have to change your entire business model overnight. Nerdio is a tool that will help you take that first crucial step out the door, though.
To start with, their website features tons of useful content. The Nerdio Academy is bursting at the seams with blogs, videos, white papers and more. Education is crucial here, so you may as well trust a genuine thought leader in the field. Regardless of whether you have some of the basics figured out already, this is an important resource that will help you truly get up to speed in a short period of time.
More importantly, however, is that once you’ve taken the plunge into those Azure waters, Nerdio will act like your life raft:
- It will help you reduce costs. You can tailor the virtual machines you will be deploying, or you can make full use of reserved instances. With AutoScaling, you only pay for what you use, saving you and your customers money.
- But cutting costs alone is no good if you can’t make a profit. Nerdio offers a practical Cost Estimator, which helps you price out what a workload’s going to look like and get a better overall idea of the financials involved. This is especially important as many MSPs are fearful of the consumption model, in which the overall costs might not be crystal-clear from the get-go. Thanks to the Cost Estimator, they’ll be able to price their offering with confidence.
- Then there’s the operational leverage. The operational capital of most MSPs is limited and you can’t stretch yourself too thin. With Nerdio, you can do a lot more with a lot less—a junior engineer will now be able to deploy and manage your environments. It’s almost too easy! This also means that your higher-level engineers can be redeployed elsewhere and engage in more valuable endeavors. Down the line, that will result in improvements in your revenue and margins.
- And let’s forget the time savings. Time is your most precious asset. You’ll never get it back once it’s gone, so it’s important to spend it wisely. Nerdio allows you to deploy quickly and scale in an impressively rapid manner. This also translates into financial savings over time.
Approach running your company holistically. You’re putting in the hours and energy now in order to reap long-term benefits. You’re scaling up your potential. Call it delayed gratification or intestinal fortitude, it’s a smart move all along. You’re not selling consumption, you’re selling a solution.
Since this infrastructure is quite complex, building up an Azure offering for your client is also a great way to figure out their other pain points. That’s another benefit in its own right: you can uncover other services and products to add on top of Azure.
Yes, Azure is scary, but it’s not impenetrable. Take your time, take a deep breath, and take a step back to look at your business model as a whole. Nerdio offers different plans to meet your specific needs, regardless of their magnitude.
Looking for a deeper dive? Check out this video where experts from Sherweb and Nerdio discuss the various challenges and opportunities along the Azure journey.
