It’s no secret that cloud services are dominating the IT world at the moment, both in terms of adoption and budget allocation. In fact, the State of IT reports that organizations spend 24% of their IT budgets on cloud services, and for good reason.

Advancements in cloud technology have transformed the way we do business, and there’s no reason to think that trend is slowing down. One of the biggest reasons for using cloud services, after all, is to reduce costs. ‌

With that in mind, it’s a bit counter-intuitive that executives estimate 30% of their cloud spending is wasted. What’s worse is that they don’t know which 30%. ‌

Many teams are leveraging cloud capabilities such as automated shutdown policies for after-work hours and rightsize instances, but with cloud spending expected to increase in the coming months, that may not be enough.

This article will provide an overview of managed cloud services, including what they are and how you can use them to get the most out of your IT budget.

What Are Managed Cloud Services?

Managed cloud services are a type of IT service management (ITSM) solution that deals with all things cloud. The goal is to help you reduce the time that your IT team has to spend on figuring out and working with solutions intended to reduce costs and increase productivity.

Managing enterprise cloud solutions requires a high level of expertise and ability to stay abreast of changes made by cloud service providers. Leveraging ITSM solutions in this area brings you the advantage of having cloud experts on your team without all the cost.

How Do Managed Cloud Services Reduce Costs?‌ 

The idea that you can reduce costs by using managed services may seem foreign, but it is nonetheless true, and there are several reasons why.

Predictable Spending

Some companies operate under business models where the volume of business varies throughout the year. Educational institutions, tax preparation companies, health insurance agencies — all of these types of organizations can benefit from using managed services because they allow them to scale their support up and down as needed.

This is in contrast to the alternatives, which include hiring and laying people off seasonally or keeping people on staff year-round with little to do. Outsourced IT services allow you to keep with the theme of cloud services in general, which operates on a pay-for-what-you-need model.

Tailored Solutions

In all likelihood, you don’t really care whether the tech behind your cloud service is AWS or Azure — you simply need your data to be secure and your workloads to be handled as efficiently as possible. In this way, managed service providers can act as brokers, helping you find the best solution to fit your organization’s unique needs at the best price.

Once you’ve worked out a solution, a good managed service provider will help you with migrating your infrastructure to the cloud, leading to your services getting up and running much faster.

‌Faster Development

The reason you have IT and development teams on staff is to handle organization-specific concerns and produce custom tools to help serve your customers. The focus of your in-house teams should be on their most important work, so they should spend as little time as possible configuring, troubleshooting, or otherwise working on things that a managed cloud service provider can do for you.

After all, the more quickly you can develop software that leads to moving the needle forward on sales, the more profitable your organization becomes overall.

Disaster Recovery

Imagine that an incident occurs after business hours that results in data loss or a disabled network. While cloud software can handle some of these events automatically, other things still require human intervention to resolve. Beginning the day’s work with critical systems offline can be extremely costly if you aren’t prepared.

Managed IT services can offer disaster recovery as a service by planning in advance for efficient data restoration using cloud storage.

How Can Global IP Help?

There’s no getting around investing in robust IT infrastructure, but doing everything you can to optimize your spending will allow you to provide better and more efficient service to your customers. Global IP provides a host of IT management services to help you accomplish your goals from managed security to IT compliance.
For further reading, check out these related articles from our blog:

Native and Shift Cloud Migrations: What You Need to Know About Cloud Services

Could Your Business Benefit from a Multi-Cloud Infrastructure?

6 Biggest Benefits of Switching to Cloud Hosting