Guest Blog: Four Steps to Guide Clients through Digital Transformation

The clearest path to digital transformation is through the cloud, and MSPs need to be ready to help customers navigate the most efficient path.

Businesses embarking on digital transformation are leveraging technologies such as virtualization, mobility, data collection and analytics to fine-tune operations, accelerate go-to-market strategies and produce better customer outcomes. Those that invest in the cloud are carving a quicker path to digital transformation, according to a recent IDG Research study.

“By increasing IT agility, the cloud makes implementing digital business initiatives a faster, easier and less expensive process,” the study found. “By reducing IT costs, utilizing a combination of public and private cloud environments enable investment in digital transformation.”

A whopping 96 percent of IT and business leaders who participated in the study said their cloud investments are delivering measurable results, and outcomes have exceeded expectations for 21 percent of them. Eighty-eight percent of participants called cloud a critical enabler of digital business.

The study strongly suggests that a multi-cloud environment is the future of IT. To stay relevant, MSPs must help their clients leverage various clouds to reap the benefits of digital transformation. Here are four steps to help your clients get there:

1. Embrace the cloud.

While MSPs have mastered remote monitoring and management of IT assets, some still struggle with how to add cloud-based hosted services to their offerings. As an MSP, it’s not whether you support cloud solutions, but when and how many. Only then can you guide clients toward smart hybrid cloud investments that will support business strategies in general and digital transformation in particular.

2. Strike a balance.

Even as they embrace both public and private clouds on the way to digital transformation, customers will still require in-house hardware deployments and expect their IT providers to handle them. So you must guide them toward new technologies while still fulfilling traditional IT provision, implementation and maintenance roles. You’ll need to find a balance between traditional and new models.

3. Reassess your role.

Realistically, MSPs won’t always be able to do it all. If you have no data center or network operations center (NOC), or skills in technologies such as data analytics, you’ll need partners to help you serve your clients. This will place you in an aggregation role, managing multiple relationships not only with traditional vendors, but also with cloud providers and distributors.

4. Transform yourself.

As you steer clients through digital transformation, you must look within to ensure your business can serve as a model. With new technologies and partner relationships comes the need to adjust business practices. Look at all your processes, from operations to finance to sales to customer service, to determine what should be tweaked–or completely rearranged–so you can improve your operations and, as a result, better serve your clients.

Visit the VMware Cloud Services InfoCenter for more information, tools and advice on the journey through digital transformation.