Overcoming 5 Biggest Customer Concerns About IaaS Clouds

Infrastructure as a service (IaaS) is a rapidly growing market that is expected to reach $38 billion in 2016 and $173 billion by 2026. This provides some great opportunities for MSPs to grow their businesses.

Even with this growth in IaaS, some clients still have concerns about moving to cloud. 

Here are five of their biggest concerns and how to solve them:

1. Security 

Your clients may be concerned with moving their on-premise solutions off-premise because of security and privacy concerns for their confidential data.

Solution:

With on-premise, keeping up with hardware updates, software updates, and security compliance can be a full-time job. However, in the cloud all of these issues are handled by a cloud service provider. The security risks from having out of date security patches on a server, router, or other hardware is greatly diminished. In many ways, moving to an IaaS provider can make managing security easier with less risk.

2. Integration problems
When your clients spend years refining processes, they understandably have integration concerns when it comes to which of those processes should be moved to the cloud and which ones should stay on-premises.

Solution:

As an MSP, you have an opportunity to provide superior training and show employees how having certain processes in the cloud will improve business operations.

3. Network bandwidth
The same network infrastructure that worked quite well when all applications were in-house may be inadequate when dealing with cloud-based services. Bandwidth required to access vast amounts of data online to do analytics, collaboration, backups, disaster recovery, and more will be inadequate to handle the task.

Solution:

To resolve this problem, counsel your client to increase their bandwidth before moving to a cloud-based implementation. Work with the IaaS provider to find out how much bandwidth you will need. Prices for bandwidth have fallen drastically over the years, and availability around the world increased.

4. Data Growth
Without proper planning, clients sometimes realize that the volume of data that they’re producing drastically increases as they move more of their technology to the cloud. As the volume and velocity of this data increases, these clients may not be able to make the most of their investment.

Solution:

Before making the move to cloud:

5. Monitor to Control Costs

One of the biggest concerns of infrastructure as a service is costs getting out of control. Set up process and utilize tools that can help you to ensure clients are getting the optimal service they’re paying for. Additionally, as the IT resource to the client on all things to do with the cloud – you can also advise them with the insights from your methodology to scale down their services at peak times and increase bandwidth and resources as their demands increase at seasonal times. 

Kirill Bensonoff is a seasoned entrepreneur and the founder of Unigma, a unified cloud management platform. Unigma has been featured in a number of publications, and Kirill blogs regularly about cloud, tech and growing your managed services business. He can be reached at [email protected].