Cloud Skills an MSPs brings to fill in the blanks
The demand for cloud services keeps surging to new highs as businesses across industry segments strive to increase business agility, promote innovation, and support their workforces—especially those working in the field or from home—and save on costs and resources.
But, implementing cloud technology can be a complex affair, made even more challenging affair due to a general lack of resource expertise and/or the skills needed to operate and manage a cloud environment optimally. This deficiency in skills hampers cloud adoption and management across all industries.
As independent AWS cloud consultants, as well as AWS Advanced Partners, Azure Cloud consultants, and Google Cloud Partners, our teams at Teleglobal undertook a survey that showed that most organizations lack 12 critical cloud skills needed to effectively implement a cloud environment. They are:
1. Cloud platform expertise
2. Information security
3. Machine learning/artificial intelligence
4. Data science/data analytics
5. Cloud-native functions/tools
6. IT integration and orchestration
7. Business intelligence/data visualization
8. Data compliance/governance
9. Application development
10. Internet of Things (IoT)
11. Open source/community code expertise
12. Third-party service provider management
There are many ways to address such a lack of cloud skills. The immediate solution that comes to mind is up-skilling existing resources. But this is easier said than done. Training or re-training employees incur a significant spend in time and resources. The next one is hiring new talent. This is as much, if not more of a challenge, and has been ever since the inception of cloud computing.
According to The Wall Street Journal, the annual posting of cloud jobs increased by over 90%, between 2017 and 2020. The fierce competition for qualified talent has effectively prevented many businesses from realizing their cloud ambitions. But there is another, far more effective solution Instead, of trying to fill in the gaps on your own, it’s far easier and cost-effective to let an MSP address any cloud skills gaps you may be facing, and remove the operational burden of modernizing, managing, and securing your cloud environment be it AWS, Azure, GCP or any other.
In return, you get to double down on running and growing your business, making the best use of your resources, time, and money. Working with next-generation AWS MSPs allows you to utilize the cloud the way it should be—as a strategic business transformation tool that delivers technical advantages and enables higher levels of business innovation and growth.
Identifying the Ideal AWS Managed Services Provider (MSP)
All AWS MSPs are not equal. You still need to ensure your shortlisted AWS MSP has the right expertise and experience to close the gaps and implement an optimized AWS cloud environment. How do you do that? In much the same way your go about your hiring process. Only instead of perusing their resumes, or conducting background checks, you check out AWS MSP that you’re thinking of hiring on the AWS Managed Service Provider Network. When you do some pay close attention to certain areas when evaluating their capabilities and reliability, as below:
Experience
There is a tried and trusted method to check the experience level of an AWS MSP, and that is by scrutinizing their partner tier. The AWS Partner Network (APN) has three tiers: Select, Advanced, and Premier categorized according to experience. From these, the Select Tier partners have the lowest experience requirements, and partners who make the AWS Premier Tier have the highest experience requirements. In a nutshell, AWS Premier Partners have the highest level of AWS vetted experience, followed by Advanced Partners.
Qualifications & Skills
The next step is to check out the prospective MSP’s qualifications and abilities. And you can do this via AWS Validated Qualifications and Practices, which lists the partner’s AWS competencies, certifications, partner programs, and service validations. The high levels of qualifications and experience required to earn such AWS competencies and certifications make it a thorough way to evaluate a prospective AWS MSPs ability to fill in any cloud skills gaps you may have and meet your cloud needs.
Credibility & References
Another piece of due diligence consists of validating the AWS MSP’s credibility, abilities, and the level of customer satisfaction they can generate. This can be done by checking out the use cases and customer references—which are usually visible online, either on their website itself or on review sites. These sections will provide a good sense of an AWS MSPs credibility. The lack of information in either of these sections should raise a flag. AWS MSPs that have a long and successful track record of providing high-quality services over a wide range of use cases should have a significant number of entries in both categories.
CSAT & NPS
Customer Satisfaction Scores (CSAT) and Net Promoter Score (NPS) are both valuable metrics to gauge customer satisfaction. While CSAT measures satisfaction for a particular project, the NPS score is a good way to assess the overall satisfaction the MSP delivers. It will give you a good understanding of what kind of service you can expect.
Your Requirements
Even before you begin searching for a suitable AWS MSP, you must evaluate and set down your specific business needs and objectives. With a clear understanding of your specific business requirements and goals, you will be better positioned to evaluate an AWS MSP and understand how well they might be able to address your skills gaps and cloud service needs, instead of simply comparing one MSP against another.
Finally, complement your research (checking out the MSP’s APN profile) to take the time to have an in-depth discussion with the provider about your business objectives and what you are looking for to achieve with AWS. This will also let you learn more about MSP and see how well they understand your pain points and business goals.
As a future-focussed AWS Advanced Partner and AWS Managed Service Provider, with a robust track record of successful AWS projects and high customer satisfaction scores, Teleglobal has the credentials to help you migrate, optimize, manage, and secure your AWS cloud environment, cost-effectively.
Reach out to us today to see how Teleglobal can help you close the loop on your cloud skills gaps and service needs.
