Hiring a Managed Services Provider (MSP) is insurance for your IT infrastructure. Combining it with DevOps is the best option to proactively monitor, manage and resolve problems in your cloud environment to make your digital transformation easier.
A recent survey conducted by Forrester concluded that at least 50% of organizations had or were planning to implement DevOps.
What is DevOps?
In its simplest form, DevOps is a set of practices that merges software development (Dev) and information technology operations (Ops) with the objective to shorten a systems development cycle. The goal of DevOps is to reduce the time between a system change like automating your current computing environment — or designing a custom infrastructure environment. During this change, quality is kept to a high standard. This practice allows you to track code changes, monitor code repositories and even create devops feedback loops as you adjust your computing architecture.
Often DevOps is used when an organization wants to move its existing legacy servers to the cloud or they need to consolidate data. Before starting a project like this, it’s important to figure out the specific needs and outcomes. DevOps works through an established set of tools known as toolchains. Each has a specific purpose and falls into a certain category. These include:
- Coding
- Building
- Testing
- Packaging
- Releasing
- Configuring
- Monitoring
Once the project is finished, this is where the MSP becomes involved. Without a provider and the proper support, your project has a greater potential for failure. With the help of the MSP, the transfer of knowledge is key to a successful project and help you enjoy the benefits DevOps and microservices.
Next Step, Managed Services
An MSP will proactively oversee and maintain your cloud IT infrastructure. This will free up your IT staff to focus on more strategic work so they don’t have to handle day-to-day troubleshooting, maintenance and patching tasks. This is especially important to possibly prevent — or at least mitigate the risks of a potential malicious attack on your system. MSPs often provide a backup and disaster recovery solution, usually as a paid service. Monitoring security threats is another MSP feature. In addition, an MSP will also handle other tasks like hosting and monitoring of your cloud platform, providing suggestions for performance improvements, potential cost savings and managing licenses — and serving as a dedicated point of contact to guide you through any issues or changes.
Why Hire an MSP?
Here’s an example of how DevOps and an MSP work together in the real world. An organization wants several applications hosted in the cloud. They either seek out a vendor to handle the project or use an internal team to design and build these applications. After the work is completed, the finished project is given back to the customer. But what if the customer doesn’t have the IT staff to handle the ongoing maintenance or troubleshooting? Or perhaps they lack the knowledge to maintain the new applications on a long-term basis.
This is where an MSP comes in. The organization would contact a third-party vendor to handle the ongoing maintenance and support. For a fraction of the cost it would take to hire enough staff to provide that maintenance, they can pay for an MSP. Their IT department can now focus on other projects without having to spend time troubleshooting and solving problems daily.
Take the burden away from your IT staff. Let us become your Managed Services Provider.
