Next-gen managed services and automation in AWS

In order to gain all the benefits offered by the constantly evolving cloud ecosystem, companies are using the expertise of Managed Service Providers (MSPs). Traditionally, MSPs provided attractive alternatives for enterprises wanting to outsource steady-state IT operations to someone who could do it cheaper, but this has evolved as the cloud itself has evolved.

Next-generation MSPs offer much more than managing infrastructure. They manage the full lifecycle of services—from planning and designing to building and optimising workloads – and focus on business outcomes that go beyond the health of individual resources.

Acquiring new skill sets and proficiencies to meet customers’ sophisticated business requirements, next-generation MSPs deliver a wide range of managed services, cloud strategy and migration services, value-added software solutions, and third-party applications. Next-gen AWS MSPs, for example, are fully certified APN Consulting Partners that are highly skilled at providing full lifecycle solutions to AWS customers.

As companies from every sector and every industry pursue best-of-breed cloud strategies in order to be more competitive, more flexible, and more efficient, they are finding new ways to do more with their existing investments. Automation is proving to be vital to this, allowing companies to eliminate repetitive tasks and the chance of human errors.

This enables IT staff to focus on mission-critical operations and innovation, in turn creating new opportunities for the business. However, while cloud providers such as AWS now offer automation capabilities for a number of common services, most businesses are unaware of the extent of these capabilities, or do not have the experience to make full use of them. Next-gen managed services are filling this gap.

Providing the consulting services to help companies identify where they can get the most value from automation, as well as full management of all automation capabilities and tools, next-gen managed services free up organisations to focus on more important things than the repetitive day-to-day tasks that take so much time. MSPs offering next-gen services ensure that everything runs how it should, when it should, and help identify and manage exceptions.

Managed automation allows companies to get more done in the same amount of time, greatly increasing productivity, and ensuring that every action is performed identically, resulting in high quality and reliable results. It also captures key metrics and performance indicators that can be used to further improve processes.

Automation managed by a next-gen MSP such as IOCO not only ensure that systems run smoothly and efficiently, but that errors are eliminated and best practices constantly leveraged. As an AWS Well-Architected APN Partner, IOCO makes use of all the automation capabilities that the AWS Platform offers to deliver a managed service to customers.