Data. From website analytics to Internet-enabled refrigerators that alert us when we’re out of milk, the number of data points consumers create every moment of every day is simply astounding. And smart businesses are always looking for ways to leverage that data to boost sales, deliver better experiences, and control costs.

Organizations are struggling to manage all of that data, causing them to turn to Managed Service Providers (MSPs) to instill order. And for many businesses, the data infrastructure employed by an MSP has a huge impact on their overall decision. In this post, we will explore how an MSP’s choice of infrastructure vendor can have an impact on their success—and ultimately the success of their customers.

Industry Trends that Are Driving MSP Adoption

According to Gartner, worldwide public cloud spending will grow 20.7% in 2023 to total $591.8 billion. As businesses increasingly invest in cloud services, many are turning to MSPs to provide a comprehensive solution. Why?

  1. Hybrid cloud setups: Many companies are loathed to put all of their eggs into one basket, instead opting for a hybrid cloud environment that lets them take advantage of the cloud’s inherent flexibility and cost savings while still maintaining some on-premises infrastructure. Making all of the pieces work together, however, presents challenges—and MSPs are uniquely positioned to help businesses create a workable solution.
  2. Remote Work: With more employees working remotely from home, businesses need help managing the plethora of VPNs and remote workstations, as well as provide support for remote workers. MSPs can help businesses coordinate and set standards for IT services and products in remote locations.
  3. IoT devices: The increasing prevalence of IoT devices gives companies even more data to collect and inform decisions. But managing massive amounts of data is no easy task, causing many businesses to search for partners—like MSPs—to whom they can outsource.
  4. Security — With “cybersecurity” on everybody’s lips, ensuring that your IT is as secure as possible is paramount. An MSP can easily take on the heavy lift of policing, training, and monitoring the system to ensure security measures are in place.
  5. A shift from traditional product models: As businesses look for any way possible to improve both the customer experience and their bottom line, many are opting for “as-a-service” offerings over traditional product offerings. They’re turning to MSPs to ensure they’re getting every bit of value out of all of their data.

How MSPs Can Capitalize on These Industry Trends

Recent research indicates that global managed services market will expand at a CAGR of 13.6% from 2023-2030. With the growth in the market showing no signs of slowing down, it’s imperative that MSPs choose a data infrastructure vendor that will allow them to capitalize on these market trends rather than missing the opportunity. But this isn’t the only reason why MSPs need to reevaluate their vendor. The desire to create flexibility in their own customer acquisition while also enhancing customer satisfaction are at the top of the list for many MSPs. Additionally, creating opportunities to increase cost efficiency, improve the value of service offerings, and align storage procurement to CAPEX/OPEX preferences will separate successful MSPs from those that lag behind.

Offering customers the best possible infrastructure platform that will fit their needs is not an option—it’s a necessity. MSPs that recognize this, and take the steps necessary to ensure their preferred vendor is the ideal solution, will be poised to meet the market’s needs and demands.

What MSPs Should Look for In a Vendor

What MSPs need is flexible and consumption-based infrastructure that can be hosted on- or off-premises allowing organizations to reap the flexibility and scalability of the public cloud while enjoying the control and performance of dedicated infrastructure. MSPs that choose a platform that meets these criteria are better able to scale capacity with ever-changing business demands while keeping costs in check.

One MSP that was able to successfully find infrastructure to fit their customers needs is Soccour Solutions. One of its clients in the oil and gas space has a software that typically runs on an on-premises physical workstation. But because more workers were staying at home due to COVID, the client needed the flexibility of a SaaS solution that could be run by the cloud providers. The biggest requirement: high performance to meet the demands of high volumes of data.

With the Silk Cloud DB Virtualization Platform, Soccour’s client saw 40-60% faster speeds than they had previously experienced on-premises. “It used to be that the users would fire up the data loading process on the software, walk away, grab coffee, do some water cooler talk, and then come back an hour later to find the data loaded,” said David Duncan, Principal Software Solutions Engineer. “On native cloud, we were seeing maximum speeds of 1.6MB/s. But with Silk, we saw 400MB/s. That increase in speed really is incredible!”

Want to see how other MSPs have done it?

Read Soccer Solution’s story to see how they achieved 40-60% faster performance for their customer.

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