Trek10 Delivers Value Through Managed Services Offerings with Support from the AWS MSP Program

By Betty Devich Oblak, Global Program Lead – AWS MSP Program
By Bappaditya Dutta, Global Tech Lead – AWS MSP Program
By Andy Warzon, CTO and Co-Founder – Trek10

Trek10

Today’s businesses are looking for cloud-native solutions to save time and resources, improve business agility, and focus on innovation. By working with a next-generation (next-gen) managed service provider (MSP), customers can leverage the cloud as a strategic business advantage that goes beyond technical benefits and generates positive business outcomes.

Amazon Web Services (AWS) created the AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner Program to identify, validate, and promote top members of the AWS Partner Network who provide solutions and services across the full customer engagement lifecycle.

The AWS MSP program team spoke with Andy Warzon, Chief Technology Officer and Co-founder of Trek10, an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner, to learn about their cloud managed services practice and the value they are creating jointly with AWS for the customers they support.

Q&A with Trek10

AWS MSP Team: Tell us about Trek10 and your areas of expertise.

Andy Warzon: I’m amazed at the aggregate impact Trek10 has had on our customers’ AWS journeys and business outcomes over these 10 years.

Trek10 has always been driven by quality engineering and a focus on AWS. That focus and engineering expertise differentiated us as a startup and is still our calling card as a Premier Tier Services Partner today.

Trek10 accelerates time to value on AWS with training and consulting, leading migrations and providing 24/7 managed services to optimize customers on AWS.

Trek10 has been on the cutting edge of cloud native application modernization for years. As a leader in Serverless, Trek10 built some of the first enterprise Serverless applications on AWS in 2015 and continues to be a leader in accelerating enterprise modernization on AWS.

Trek10 has AWS Competencies in Migration, SaaS, DevOps, and IoT and certified designations in the AWS Managed Service Provider and AWS Public Sector Partner programs. In addition, our team has achieved over 150 active certifications combined.

Trek10 has assisted in building architecture and supporting over 1000 workloads with use cases ranging from migration and modernization to data and analytics.

AWS MSP Team: How would you describe your managed services practice and its value propositions?

Andy: Our MSP is focused on continuously protecting and optimizing our customers’ AWS environments with a deep catalog of AWS-native tools and processes.

The practice was built with a 100% focus on AWS and has been tested and refined in the crucible of mission-critical production AWS environments for almost 10 years.

As an overview, we have two complimentary but distinct offerings.

The first is CloudOps 24/7. Trek10 brings our pre-built library of monitoring, runbooks, and custom software to layer comprehensive observability onto your AWS environment. This includes 24/7 response by certified engineers.

Monitoring includes virtual machines, AWS native services, and application-level metrics. This covers the aspects of the AWS Well Architected Framework, notably with comprehensive security, uptime, and performance monitoring. Our team works with customers to ensure comprehensive monitoring and high-quality response plans.

Our platform delivers curated recommendations for optimizing environments, aligned to the pillars of the AWS Well Architected Framework.

This offering is deeply integrated with Datadog. Trek10 was one of the first AWS Partners to utilize Datadog as an MSP over seven years ago, and was one of the first Datadog Gold Partners.

The second managed services offering is our Team Support service. This is a close compliment to the 24/7 service, but both can be purchased separately.

Trek10 delivers a named customer success lead and lead architect to help you maintain a roadmap of continuous optimization of your AWS environment, and then a team of engineers execute on that roadmap. This can include escalating issues or root cause analysis from issues identified with 24/7 monitoring service as well as business priorities or optimization initiatives.

Think of Team Support as having access to an entire team of AWS certified experts who understand your environment.

AWS MSP Team: Nearly every industry is going through some sort of digital transformation, and many are migrating to or enhancing their investment in the cloud. How does Trek10 support customers on this journey?

Andy: We find that a key to digital transformation is focusing on applications, not infrastructure. As specialists in application modernization, we align migration, modernization, and ongoing managed services to the business outcomes of our customers’ applications.

With our focus rooted in outcomes, this transformation is perfect for our customers’ needs. Nothing has changed in our effort to work through discovery and help our customers zero in on how to identify their desired business outcomes.

AWS MSP Team: What is unique about Trek10’s managed services offering, and what are the key benefits your customers gain from using your services?

Andy: Our managed services deliver the playbook and systems to be successful operating your production system in AWS on day one. Our customers get the benefit of an approach that has been refined for almost 10 years in critical AWS production environments, applied to their workloads in an accelerated yet white glove onboarding experience.

Our rigorous operational standards and processes are second to none, as evidenced by our repeated high scores on the AWS MSP audit, our SOC2 compliance, and our 10 years of happy customers.

As a Datadog Gold Partner with over eight years of experience, our systems and processes are deeply integrated with their platform.

Our culture and team are a powerful differentiator. We pride ourselves on giving our customers a service experience that is friendly, engaged, and highly personalized.

Our platform delivers expert insights. We identify meaningful and actionable findings in our environments, and then ensure we give context and understanding to our customers about what this means for them. Our platform delivers insights in a seamless user experience and makes it easy to take next steps.

AWS MSP Team: What does your typical managed services customer look like?

Andy: We’re proud to say that we’ve got customers in a vast array of industries and geographies – from small-to-medium sized businesses to enterprise accounts. That’s by design and part of our approach focusing on business impact.

Our most successful matches are customers that value the transformation to cloud native, from getting started to advanced serverless environments. Trek10 is expert in bringing our customers along in that modernization journey and then operating and optimizing those environments.

While we have some specific parameters to understand how we can best be a fit for a prospect, so much of our ethos around customer outcomes is focused on ensuring that we can make a difference. That difference is based on our competencies, certifications, and overall ability to perform for the needs of a company.

AWS MSP Team: What are some of the biggest challenges your customers are facing? How is Trek10 helping to solve those problems using AWS?

Andy: Security in the cloud is a mindset shift for people new to AWS. Old concerns go away (“did I lock the data center door?”) and powerful new tools are available, but it can be a challenge to shift the focus to new vulnerabilities, like Amazon S3 bucket policies and root access.

Trek10’s CloudOps service provides an all-in-one initial layer of protection that includes security software, custom tooling, and comprehensive response plans. This lets our customers focus on their unique application security needs and build up more layers of defense.

Cost management is also a challenge. Customers that have it figured out see huge economic impacts from moving to the cloud, but there is always a risk that cloud sprawl or mistakes punch a hole in that budget and make cloud a financial drain.

Trek10’s cost monitoring gives you visibility, and via our Team Support offering, continuously optimizes your environment and keeps your spend under control.

A trend we see is difficulty finding ways to make cloud profitable – that is, everyone is going to the cloud because they know they need to be there, but many lack the ability to leverage AWS for their business or application. Trek10’s knowledge of AWS bridges the gap between customer goals and business outcomes.

AWS MSP Team: How has the AWS MSP program helped your business grow?

Andy: With its rigorous standards and thorough certification audit, the AWS MSP badge is an instant marker of credibility. Our multiple perfect scores on the MSP program’s audit every three years only enhance this credibility.

With Trek10’s MSP offerings in Team Support and CloudOps 24/7, trust thrives with that day-to-day support framework. That has unlocked many opportunities to engage with various teams within a company and has led to other projects to help our customers modernize.

Those engagements help foster a deeper relationship and ultimately unlock opportunities for additional managed service offerings. In many companies we support, we’re often providing technical expertise for various teams throughout.

AWS MSP Team: What is the biggest driver for Trek10 to attain and renew the AWS MSP badge?

Andy: The desire to help those who are already leveraging AWS to achieve their (and their customers’) goals. It may sound cliché, but we love to help. And as a matter of fact, “giving back” is one of our Trek10 Values and a primary driver for the way we approach our work. Being a part of the MSP program is a natural fit in Trek10’s mantra.

AWS MSP Team: How did Trek10 leverage the AWS MSP program checklist to build and refine your managed services practice?

Andy: The checklist helped Trek10 to see that the proactive monitoring we were doing using dynamic thresholds and statistical analysis should be surfaced more to clients because AWS has learned how much they value this.

Trek10 learned how to more deeply integrate with and leverage AWS support in our managed services to provide a more streamlined experience for customers. The MSP program checklist, through a long list of improvements, gave Trek10 a head start in working to achieve SOC2 Compliance.

As part of preparing for the MSP program audit, Trek10 created a robust risk mitigation methodology and procedure.

Trek10 also developed a well-defined customer satisfaction procedure that specifies how the customer feedback is collected and analyzed to determine overall satisfaction.

AWS MSP Team: What are you doubling down on in 2023?

Andy: Trek10 will continue to focus on application modernization and drive benefits and outcomes through managed service offerings. We will increase the comprehensiveness of our observability solutions through the full stack and doubling down on our security focus.

All of our services are orchestrated to meet our customers where they’re ready to launch. That’s by design. Our managed services framework has had success because of our inquisitive approach to understand a customer’s business and goals in order to help them succeed.

About Trek10

Trek10 is an AWS Premier Tier Services Partner and a certified AWS Managed Services Provider. They have extensive expertise helping assess, migrate, deploy, operate, and optimize customers’ solutions on AWS.

Through consultations and planning, Trek10 works with their customers to understand their vision for the future and provides solutions and services needed to achieve it. Regardless of where your business is on its migration journey, Trek10 helps you realize your desired business outcomes leveraging experience and tested solutions to drive success throughout the migration process.

Through managed operations and continuous optimization efforts, Trek10 helps customers improve their business agility, security posture, and operational efficiency and create more value from every dollar they are spending on cloud.

About the AWS MSP Program

The AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) Partner Program is designed to support MSPs by providing a set of prescriptive and tested best practices to help develop next-generation managed services offerings and capabilities aligned with tomorrow’s needs.

As part of the program, MSPs work with a designated AWS Partner Manager and Partner Solutions Architect to create a defined managed services offering aligned to AWS best practices. Through helpful reviews, gap analysis, and workshops, members of the program prepare for an audit of their offering.

Once MSPs pass the audit, they are awarded the AWS MSP designation badge, which they can use to differentiate their offering to customers. Customers look for these validated partners when searching for help managing their cloud solutions.

Working with validated AWS MSP Partners, customers can feel confident that they are engaging with organizations that have appropriate expertise and experience to guide them on their cloud transformation journey.