MSPs: 6 Ways to Ease Client Pains and Boost Cloud Adoption

MSP Solution: Take cloud migration slow and easy. Encourage clients to adopt a hybrid approach. Clients can move at their pace, switching to the cloud one service at a time. For example, they can start small by moving only their email services; they can then sample the advantages of cloud without being overwhelmed by a complete and total migration.

MSP solution: Here are cloud benefits tailored to your needs. Before you make your sales pitch, anticipate potential objections and be equipped to respond to them. While cloud isn’t for everyone, inaccurate perceptions may stop your clients from making an advantageous business move. Make sure they have all the facts on hand so that they can make an informed decision. Be ready to hear them out, identify their pains and worries, and match your solutions to their concerns. The top client objections include cost, data security, compliance readiness, remote team access, and the seemingly insurmountable task of moving all legacy apps to cloud. Address their concerns directly and present the advantages of cloud migration: faster apps/services deployment times, enhanced security, simplified infrastructure, reduced operational costs, improved collaboration and more.

MSP solution: Cloud offers financial gains. Explain the significant savings coming from lower operating costs. Their physical server costs money even when they’re idle, so sharing cloud infrastructure with other organizations allows them to pay only for your workload demands; lower energy costs without their own underutilized data center; lower staffing budgets and benefit from a more streamlined workforce; ensures no upfront investments; and requires no purchase of redundant or spare hardware. Moreover, most MSPs offer various pricing models tailored to client requirements, including per user; tiered bundles; and a la carte for more flexibility and customization.

MSP solution: Cloud has multiple levels of control and security. People are understandably fearful about storing data off-site. Educate clients that cloud providers regularly install patches and updates for them, saving them time and reducing the risk of attacks without cloud services downtime. Cloud services are well secured against DDoS attacks; encrypt data while providing sophisticated employee-sharing tools; and protect against power outages, natural disasters and human errors that can cause data loss. Moreover, as MSPs, you can provide support by offering the best security solution for the client’s business needs. You also need to remind them that the cloud provider has a much larger security budget than they do and can provide security they cannot afford.

MSP solution: Cloud provides better backup and archiving options. Cloud backup enables companies to send a copy of a physical file to a secondary off-site location to preserve it should the company face equipment failure or other disaster. By using cloud backup, customers can bolster their data protection game plan without adding to the workload of their IT departments and save on labor, hardware and software licensing costs. A cloud archive serves as long-term storage for data only occasionally accessed but nevertheless vital for compliance. Cloud archiving is cost effective when compared with in-house archiving and eliminates the need to buy archiving hardware and software for on-premise use. Cloud archiving also helps companies use less power and cooling resources and reduces the data center footprint.

MSP solution: MSPs are vital to your cloud journey. Some businesses prefer a cloud environment where they have full control and don’t mind getting minimal support from their provider, a situation often found with the big cloud players. Other customers prefer, or need, extensive guidance, support and services so they can focus their attention on other critical parts of their business. They would benefit more by working with an MSP. Reinforce your vast array of services, including monitoring, management; providing hybrid infrastructure support; automating their cloud infrastructure to reduce the complexity of IT operations; and helping their businesses become more agile. By providing their cloud expertise, user-friendly services and widespread mobile access, MSPs can be the dependable partner clients need to help them in their cloud journey.