AWS Partner Network (APN) Blog
7 Reasons a Next-Generation AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner is Fundamental to Your Cloud Journey
By Barbara Kessler, Global APN & MSP Programs Leader at AWS
By migrating to and building on Amazon Web Services (AWS), companies around the world are re-defining what’s possible.
The explosive growth of technology solutions available from AWS and AWS Partner Network (APN) Partners, combined with the need for faster and more agile solution development, raises many questions for companies seeking to modernize their business.
Where do we begin?
How do we stay competitive?
How do we balance rapid development and infrastructure management?
AWS Managed Service Providers (MSPs) can help enterprises invent tomorrow, solve business problems, and support initiatives by driving key outcomes. AWS MSPs provide the expertise, guidance, and services to help you migrate to AWS and optimize your workloads through each stage the cloud adoption journey: Plan & Design > Build & Migrate > Run & Operate > Optimize.
Let’s discuss how AWS MSP Partners are fundamental to helping your company take advantage of the AWS Cloud.
1. Business Transformation: It Doesn’t Have to Be Daunting
Embracing a cloud-focused strategy requires making changes to your organization’s culture and approach to IT. It may seem daunting at first, possibly leading to concerns about how specific roles and departments will be impacted.
AWS MSP Partners have been through a cloud transformation journey themselves, and each can share their experience, skills, and solutions that will help make your journey seamless.
AWS MSPs provide general consulting on the total cost of ownership (TCO) for building on AWS, and they analyze your application portfolio and the readiness of your workloads. Additionally, AWS MSPs provide cloud adoption roadmap design services, as well as many other services to help you develop confidence and clear expectations.
Helping you navigate and implement the necessary changes, and educating your organization and people about the values of cloud, is one of the biggest benefits AWS MSPs can offer.
“Our business as a next-generation MSP is to help our customers accelerate their cloud adoption and build their knowledge and understanding of the technology,” says Jason McKay, Chief Technology Officer at AWS MSP Logicworks.
AWS MSP Partners know that success begins and ends with people. Your employees, from leadership to support staff, must be comfortable with and aligned to the vision. By engaging an AWS MSP at the beginning of your cloud adoption journey, you’ll have a trusted partner with resources, experience, and techniques to leverage along the way.
2. Keep it Simple: Engage with One Provider from Point A to Z
The AWS MSP Partner Program recognizes leading APN Consulting Partners that are highly skilled at providing full lifecycle solutions to customers.
To become a member of the AWS MSP Partner Program, a provider must pass a third-party audit (which you can read more about here) and demonstrate capabilities that extend across the full customer lifecycle. Providers must show they offer robust services and tooling to support each stage of the cloud adoption journey: Plan & Design > Build & Migrate > Run & Operate > Optimize.
With deep expertise on AWS, APN Consulting Partners are uniquely positioned to help you achieve your business objectives. Having these capabilities enables enterprise customers to focus their efforts and dive deep with one provider, rather than having to engage multiple providers at different steps of the journey.
Your AWS MSP Partner will develop a deep understanding of your environment and needs, and proactively help you optimize your AWS workloads.
“The insight and measurement into what customers need are what feeds a virtuous circle that allows us to constantly provide more value and more agility through our managed service model,” says Steve McCormick, Chief Customer Architect at AWS MSP Arq Group.
3. Security Best Practices: As Challenges Evolve, So Do AWS MSPs
Ensuring security and compliance for workloads and applications on AWS is the most important step for most customers, particularly those in the Financial Services, Government, Life Sciences, and Healthcare industries.
Many highly regulated industries have their own security and governance regulations and policies that evolve over time. Security automation and implementation of good governance practices are at the heart of a next-generation MSP practice, and many AWS MSPs have built practices tailored to the needs of customers in these industries.
Through professional services offerings, managed services, and in-house solutions, support, and expertise, AWS MSP Partners help customers design well-architected solutions on AWS to meet stringent security requirements specific to a customer’s needs.
A next-gen AWS MSP also builds its practice, tooling, and platforms in accordance with AWS security best practices.
4. Quicker Development: Invest Wisely & Embrace Automation
In today’s fast-paced and digital world, companies that are able to respond to customer requests and anticipate needs quickly gain a competitive edge.
The ability to develop, test, and deploy new features and services to end users at a consistent pace is crucial. For most companies, releasing new features on a quarterly basis simply won’t cut it in today’s markets.
Automation is a core tenet of what AWS considers to be “next-generation” for MSPs, and by engaging with an AWS MSP Partner you can take advantage of their deep expertise in automation.
Next-gen AWS MSPs also help you embrace DevOps principles and practices internally, and gain an ability to focus resources and time on developing new features—rather than devoting valuable internal resources to infrastructure management.
5. Speed Matters: You Can Depend on an AWS MSP’s SLA Expertise
Service Level Agreements (SLAs) are tied to business outcomes. For most business-critical applications, any unplanned downtime results in lost revenue and opportunities. AWS MSP Partners design their practices, services, and tooling to support infrastructure and workload-specific SLAs, and continuously take action to improve performance.
Next-gen AWS MSPs leverage AWS services and third-party tools, such as application and infrastructure monitoring and management solutions, to support your workload and business SLAs.
By relying on an AWS MSP for cloud managed services, you can ease your team’s burden trying to achieve SLAs that are integral to your success and end user experience.
6. Optimization: Transform Your Workloads & Save Money
When you entrust an AWS MSP Partner to manage your footprint, they aren’t simply keeping the lights on. They are consistently monitoring performance, usage, and patterns to identify opportunities to save you money, increase performance, and take advantage of new tooling as it’s released.
For example, a next-gen AWS MSP uses cost management tools to identify areas in which your company may be able to save money by taking advantage of Amazon EC2 Reserved Instances (RIs), or times of day when you may not need to have particular instance types turned on, such as test/dev instances.
AWS MSP Partners have recurring meetings with customers to review detailed usage and performance reports, and proactively offer and propose cost optimization strategies to help you save money and improve performance.
7. ISV Solutions: Take Advantage Without Directly Investing in Tools
AWS MSP Partners take advantage of many third-party tools within their platforms, including solutions from independent software vendors (ISVs). These tools cover cost management, event logging, data visualization, infrastructure and application security, configuration and vulnerability analysis, data protection, CI/CD pipelines, migration solutions, and more.
AWS MSPs use solutions from AWS Competency Partners, a program that highlights APN Partners that have demonstrated technical proficiency and proven customer success in specialized solution areas like machine learning.
By teaming up with an AWS MSP, you can save yourself the trouble of vetting, procuring, and implementing third-party tooling because your MSP is already doing so for you. You’ll gain the benefits that come from using leading technology solutions without having to invest additional time, resources, and energy into vendor selection.
Next-Gen AWS MSP Partner Spotlights
AWS MSP Partners are skilled at cloud infrastructure and application migration, providing proactive monitoring, automation, and management of their customers’ AWS environment. To obtain the MSP Partner designation, APN Consulting Partners must meet stringent program requirements, including a third-party audit of their MSP capabilities.
Here are a few ways next-gen AWS MSP Partners have helped customers. See all MSP spotlights >>
Logicworks & NextGate
NextGate’s mission is to help customers flexibly and cost-effectively deploy their platform without having to install the software on their own servers. To accelerate their product launch, NextGate turned to AWS MSP Logicworks to architect, build, manage, and support platform deployment on AWS. NextGate accelerated their time-to-market on AWS, which has helped them bring value to healthcare providers much faster.
Serverworks & Marunebi
Marubeni needed to migrate their IT footprint from an on-premises environment to AWS while automating operations and infrastructure. AWS MSP Serverworks helped Marubeni overcome the shortage they faced with internal engineering resources, providing the customer with ongoing management and support. Marunebi achieved better development and operational efficiency by using Serverworks’ Cloud Automator.
Silver Lining & Mary Kay
AWS MSP Silver Lining helps companies successfully build on AWS in China. Mary Kay relies on Silver Lining’s CloudEasy management platform to automate a majority of their operations and maintenance services, while also using AWS to automate alarm triggers and process events to conduct billing and log analysis at scale. Using CloudEasy on AWS, Mary Kay estimates their IT operating costs have decreased by as much as 60 percent.
Get Started with a Next-Gen AWS MSP Partner
We’re proud to have built a robust MSP Partner Program that includes vetted next-generation AWS MSPs from around the world. No matter where you’re located, what your focus is, or where you’re at along the cloud adoption journey, there’s an AWS MSP that can help you drive transformational business outcomes.
Are you ready to explore the AWS MSP Partner community? Check out the AWS MSP Partner Program and begin exploring Managed Service Providers that may be a good fit for you.
Build on AWS … with the help of a next-generation AWS MSP Partner!
