During the past nine years of delivering cloud solutions to government and industry, our team has identified a gap in the delivery of Managed Service Provider (MSP) solutions in a cloud environment.
As an AWS Premier Consulting Partner with the DevOps, Government, and Non-Profit competencies, as well as the GovCloud Skill Partner Status, there are few workloads that we haven’t helped customers migrate and manage in a cloud environment. We also deliver these solutions through Microsoft Azure, where we are a Silver Cloud Partner.
Our focus with MSP is around a structured, repeatable, five-step MSP process
We previously discussed the Evaluation, Automation, and Optimization phases as part of the MSP process. In this blog – the fourth in a series of five on Next Generation MSP (NG-MSP) – we’ll touch on Monitoring, a critical component of a successful MSP strategy from a visibility perspective. Appropriate monitoring of infrastructure as part of our NG-MSP strategy affords both Effectual and our customers the ability to be proactive in measures by collecting, analyzing, and acting on information efficiently.
Further, as we develop a custom NG-MSP playbook for our customer, we’re going to look at where we can integrate with existing Security or Network Operations Center. For us, we don’t see NG-MSP as a one-size fits all model, which is a spot where many traditional MSP providers, even cloud MSP providers, miss the mark.
Proper cloud-first, NG-MSP monitoring must focus on
- Adherence to cost and best practices, including tooling from industry leaders such as CloudCheckr
- The proper configuration and performance of services such as AWS’s CloudWatch
- Incorporating logging tools such as AWS CloudTrail
- Analyzing logs through native cloud services such as AWS’s Macie or third-party tools such as Splunk.