The cloud is forcing MSPs to think differently about what it means to be an MSP. Maybe adding Cloud Performance Services to your Service Catalog is a good start.

Say you have a customer using Amazon’s EC2 compute services –  in addition to the managed services you provide – in addition to the stuff they run internally.  What can you do, as an MSP, as trusted advisor, if Amazon’s EC2 performance starts to degrade or fails completely. You may think “It’s Amazon’s problem”.  I can’t send out a bunch of engineers to fix Amazon. You would be right about that, but that’s still old school MSP thinking…

First, just presenting a consolidated portal view – a single pane of glass – for all your customer’s monitored IT environments, including Amazon, is in itself very high value.  Get the customer to your branded service delivery portal and keep them there – one place for all IT service instrumentation – cloud included.

Next, start monitoring Amazon and implement performance thresholds based on customer business requirements. Then when the EC2 service begins degrading - a performance threshold will breach, launch an alarm to your NOC,  and you PROACTIVELY help your customer shift workloads to another provider before the services crash.

Seems like a very high value managed service to me – one that customers will appreciate and buy – and one that today’s MSPs are well positioned to execute.

MSPs are worried about the future prospects of traditional managed hosting offerings in the face of competition for customer compute dollars from companies with huge scale advantages like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. I get the concern.  But the cloud genie is not going back in the bottle.  End users are going to embrace public cloud services regardless of how worried MSPs are about it.  MSPs can either understand that as a fact of life and figure out ways to add value in a cloud delivered IT world or be destined for irrelevance (or at least be much less relevant).  But the smart guys – the guys that understand the strength of Unified Monitoring – they will not only survive, but thrive.  The key Unified Monitoring concepts for MSPs to keep in mind are “single pane of glass” and “account control”.

Let’s talk about the “single pane of glass”.  End users will not want to look at 3,4,5,6 different portals (SaaS, Managed Hosts, Cloud, Internal) for information about system performance and availability.  That dispersion of information is inherently very risky and inefficient.  So consolidating the data into a single Service Delivery Portal, and then transforming the data to actionable information is high value add in itself.  For example, the email transit measurements and comparisons between Google Gmail and Hosted Microsoft Exchange at unifiedmonitoring.com is a very simple example of the type of value-add analyses that can be done now.  It will only get better as the science and art evolves.  But MSPs can measure cloud performance and analyze the data to help customers make better cloud purchasing choices – today.

Regarding Account Control: SP customers are going to go somewhere for cloud instrumentation.  Personally, if I were an SP with customers using public cloud services I would be spending a lot of time figuring out how to keep my customers at my branded delivery portal rather than having them “change the channel” to go get it at Amazon or another SP competitor.  This strikes me as a no brainer – be the center of the customer’s IT world – 24X7X365.

End users need help making sense of their cloud options.  Unified Monitoring is the concept that SPs need to wrap their mind around to stay trusted advisor and primary service provider while their customers buy services from the cloud.

I recently wrote up a few thoughts and experiences on the criticality of a Service Catalog for SPs.  If you’re interested in reading about it go to MSPmentor.