Are you unhappy with your IT provider’s service, performance, and company as a whole? Unfortunately, many business leaders answer “yes,” yet they remain customers for several years. Why? Because they feel they are “held hostage” to their Managed IT Service Provider’s private cloud. In other words, their servers and business-critical data are hosted on systems owned and controlled by their IT provider at a remote location. Often, to transition to another Managed Services Provider (MSP), they must face the hidden fees and necessary costs to make a change for the better, all while continuing to receive unreliable tech support and poor customer service. However, if you find yourself in a similar situation, there is a way out. We’ve helped business leaders like you escape from an MSP’s private cloud and move to Microsoft Azure, a more scalable, cost-efficient, and robust cloud solution. Most importantly, the migration to a public cloud solution like Microsoft Azure gives you ownership of your data and allows you to choose the right solution provider to manage your technology.
In the past, the MSP-hosted private cloud was a standard offer. However, today, it generally does not make sense to rely on an IT provider’s private cloud when you can implement solutions like Azure and have access to more capabilities with fewer restrictions. For this reason, we made a conscious shift from recommending our private cloud solution to clients and educating their leadership team about the benefits of moving to a public cloud solution like Microsoft Azure instead.
The Azure cloud gives small, midsize, and growing organizations access to Microsoft’s enterprise-level capabilities, with over 200 products and cloud services that provide the flexibility to solve their business challenges. Our experienced Microsoft professionals work with our clients to use the best-fit tools and frameworks to build, run, and manage applications across multiple clouds, on-premise, and at the edge. However, the path to “freedom” isn’t always pleasant and can present many challenges throughout the cloud migration process.
“We sometimes have prospective clients who complain to us for years about the poor service they receive from their current provider, and yet they can never work up the courage to make the switch. They know how painful their current provider will make it to leave.”
Mitchell R. Sowards, Executive Technologist
Whether you have been a private-cloud hostage to an MSP for six months or six years, you must swallow the same bitter pill if you want to switch to a new IT outsourcing provider. You’ll have to make the financial investment to migrate to a solution like Azure at some point, so why not do it now? Making a move does more for your business than free your team from the burden of poor IT service performance. Our Microsoft professionals can help your business design a scalable cloud solution built on your terms and ready to evolve with your business needs with a solution like Azure.
This post will explore a few more situations that may strike a chord as we walk through what exactly it means to be “private-cloud hostage” to an MSP and how the public cloud offers a way out.
What Does It Mean to Be “Hostage” to a Managed It Services Provider’s Private Cloud?
Often, you are hosted in a “multi-tenant” environment where you share physical servers with the other clients of the MSP. Because of this, they must severely restrict how you can access your data and cause you to feel trapped by the MSP’s solution and stuck with their poor service delivery.
Even if you are happy with your IT provider’s service delivery, you can still be “private-cloud hostage” to your MSP as you’re likely overpaying and missing out on more advanced features. Be wary of the red flags described below and take proactive actions to protect yourself from becoming a hostage later. If you are not happy, not getting the most value from your cloud solution, and looking to switch, you may find yourself in one or all the situations below.
Work with an MSP Who Can Help You Migrate Cloud Solutions the Right Way
Switching from one MSP to another does not have to be difficult, but some providers intentionally make the process long and tedious. When your data lives in your IT provider’s private cloud, they have control of your information and, often, your business-critical systems, which means they must be involved in the transition to the new Managed IT Services Provider. Yet when you ask them about transition (or review your contract for such information), you discover they severely restrict your access to your critical data and systems, allowing for only a single slow method of extracting data from their cloud. This means the provider has control of when and how you do that.]
Such delays can cause the cloud migration process to take weeks to complete, resulting in downtime, lost productivity, and headaches for your team and the customers you serve.
When done right, migrating to the public cloud can provide long-term ROI by increasing productivity, security, and efficiency across your business. However, it takes an experienced Managed IT Services Provider to do it right. You want to work with an MSP who will manage the process, not put you in the middle. Partner with a provider you can trust, and make sure the MSP you choose has the expertise to guide your business through a successful migration that meets your needs now and in the future.
What’s Next? Make a move to Microsoft Azure
It’s not pleasant when you feel stuck with an unsatisfactory IT provider or when you’re throwing money away on outdated technology solutions that don’t empower your people with the tools and information they need. While switching from your MSP’s private cloud to a public cloud platform like Azure can seem like a risky investment, it’s better than settling for what you have now and suffering the accumulating loss of business scalability and employee productivity as a result.
Throwing money at an unpleasant situation doesn’t solve the root of the problem and costs your business more long-term. Instead, talk with an IT consultant that can help you make a move to a best-fit solution and invest in successful IT you can rely on when you need it.
As a Microsoft Gold Partner, and with a team of IT professionals who have helped companies across areas of Houston, Dallas, Fort Worth, San Antonio, Texas, as well as Seattle, Washington to make a move to solutions like the Azure cloud, we can help you do the same. We offer Microsoft 365 and Cloud services to help your business find and implement the best cloud solution for your needs.
Learn more about the benefits our Microsoft cloud solutions have to offer and schedule a time to speak with our team.