An IT Support Blog from London

As with all other industries, the Managed Services Provider (MSP) sector faces numerous challenges. Coming out of the pandemic, 64% of MSPs have managed to stay competitive, while the rest lagged behind. Still, there’s fierce competition and changing client expectations to deal with. That’s why MSPs need to come up with a framework that’s sustainable and cost-effective for both the customer and their business.

Given these demands, MSPs are driven to leverage the wide availability of tech solutions and automation tools. Using the ‘think cloud’ mantra, MSPs are using the various SaaS solutions out there to keep up with technology adoption, all while efficiently managing integrations, tools, people, and processes.

In this article, we'll explore 5 ways that MSPs can level up their services with SaaS solutions. We'll also put particular focus on how SaaS and automation can make IT support smoother so it contributes to the overall business operations. But first, let’s refresh our knowledge on cloud technologies.

As one of the most groundbreaking technologies of our time, cloud computing has revolutionised the way people do business. The cloud’s many characteristics have allowed organisations to change the way they approach and provision IT infrastructure. But these benefits—flexibility, scalability, agility, and cost-effectiveness, among others, can only be realised if companies are able to recognise what the cloud offers and leverage these features.

In order to maximise the cloud’s features, businesses now turn to managed IT services for guidance. So just as enterprises have evolved because of cloud services, so have managed services providers (MSPs). In this blog post, we look into the ways that organisations have come to rely on cloud services, understand how the cloud is evolving, and explore the role of IT managed services in maximising opportunities provided by the cloud.

Among the key technologies pushing businesses forward today are artificial intelligence (AI) and cloud computing. The numbers back this up. AI, for instance, is projected to be a mind-boggling $407-billion dollar industry by 2027, growing at a projected compound annual growth rate of 37.3% from 2023 to 2030. Cloud services, in the meantime, continue their steady rise, with Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) forecast to show the highest end-user spending growth for this year.

The high adoption rates for these two industries are certainly not out of coincidence or sheer luck. Since cloud computing gained significant traction and became mainstream in the late 2000s, it has served as a huge driver of change in how organisations do business. The entry of artificial intelligence and machine learning algorithms have only served to enhance the cloud’s adaptability and its capability to leverage data.

Cloud adoption has been fast on the rise for years now. At least 94% of businesses are using cloud solutions to a certain extent, with the Flexera 2023 State of the Cloud Report revealing that more organisations are embracing multi-cloud and hybrid cloud strategies.

Going hybrid is a prudent strategy for many enterprises. The benefits of the cloud are well-documented, but keeping most data and some applications in an on-premise data centre is a security practice fitting for many companies. The ideal solution? A hybrid cloud that offers the best of both worlds.

In this blog post, we offer a clear definition of what a hybrid cloud is and its importance. We also explain the challenges that come with a hybrid environment, and discuss some important aspects to hybrid cloud management.

Artificial Intelligence (AI) has transformed the dynamics of many organisations across almost every industry. Companies and the leaders at the helm of these businesses have long realised the benefits of harnessing AI algorithms in their daily operations. From automating and streamlining various business processes to preventing fraud to enhancing data analytics for targeted marketing and better decision making, the impact of AI on enterprises has been nothing short of groundbreaking.

Now while AI development and technological advancement in general has paved the way for various innovations, it has also opened many opportunities for malicious actors to exploit. This is why artificial intelligence has been a major boon but somewhat a bane as well to the IT security industry. Let’s start with the negative ways that AI has affected online security.

The power of cloud computing has been making transformative changes in many organisations across all industries. Access to cloud solutions have paved the way for businesses to achieve scalability and flexibility in a timely and cost-effective manner, allowing them to innovate and grow with remarkable agility.

As cloud environments meet more intricate and greater business demands however, managing the complexities of cloud applications, platforms, and infrastructure has proven to be a daunting challenge for many companies especially larger enterprises. Cloud managed services have thus, stepped into the picture to address this growing concern of many organisations.

To say that cloud computing is a game changer is a gross understatement. It has transformed the way organisations consume technology, allowing businesses to acquire cost-effective resources on demand—from ‘access anywhere’ storage to virtualised computing hardware. Cloud solutions have also upended traditional workplace practices in favour of a distributed workforce and real-time online collaboration.

The cloud has indeed significantly impacted the way technology has evolved over the years but it isn’t quite done yet. Today’s revolutionary tech trends are largely driven by cloud computing and, with hardware and software procurement made faster, it’s easier for enterprises to deploy new cloud services and tools that can help with their business needs.

All that said, we discuss in this post what the latest trends and technologies in cloud computing are and how you as an organisation can leverage these for your business.

Now that most organisations are all caught up and aboard the cloud computing train, the focus has now shifted to discovering and unlocking the promised value of the cloud. While the cloud’s elasticity and agility have provided enterprise-grade IT infrastructure to smaller businesses without incurring heavy capital expenditures, it has also led to significant waste of resources and difficulty in controlling cloud spending.

A McKinsey Digital article reveals that a whopping 80% of companies find it challenging to manage cloud spend. Further, the Anodot 2022 State of Cloud Cost survey reports that 49% of businesses struggle with cloud costs. This scenario is certainly not what enterprises anticipated when they decided to embark on the cloud journey. Fortunately, there’s a sound approach to managing costs so you can maximise your cloud solutions; it’s called cloud cost optimisation.

If your organisation has migrated to the cloud, then good for you. Depending on the extent of your utilisation of cloud solutions, you would have already saved your business valuable time, manpower, and money. As enterprises may discover at some point, however, there are also some challenges to embracing cloud computing. One of these is to understand exactly where your cloud spend is going. To avoid inefficiency and wastefulness, it’s important to use cloud resources in the right way by applying cloud cost optimisation.

The rise of virtual computing environments and the constant challenge to lower operating costs have spurred the demand for thin clients. From its current 2022 valuation of USD 1.19 billion, the global thin client market is expected to reach USD 1.32 billion by 2030, or an annual growth rate of 2.8%.

What has further aided the increased usage of thin clients is the advancement of technologies such as faster broadband networks, more powerful servers, cheaper storage, and a host of cloud solutions to cater to the enterprise’s every need. In this blog post, we discuss what a thin client is, what its advantages are, and the use cases that would make it better over the PC.