There are many essential ways a modern MSP can help today’s financial organizations. Just as important as the cybersecurity protections we focused on in our previous post, agility in the cloud is another key priority that an MSP can deliver on for clients.
Cloud capabilities are the foundation for the innovation that drives new applications, tools and business processes – supporting company growth while also facilitating scalability, cost-effectivity and the dynamic provisioning of resources. But such outcomes don’t happen automatically. Effective cloud capabilities take the expert management and ongoing customization of cloud environments by the right MSP to support this level of innovation.
Financial Firms Struggle With Cloud Adoption… The Right MSP Can Help
Especially given the range of specialized domains and business processes, a particular alternative investment firm will have very specific requirements in the cloud that are determined by that company’s size, maturity and operational focus. These customized needs are not well-served by the prevailing one-size-fits-all mindset that can slow progress as an organization struggles to expand operations further into the cloud.
For instance, both Azure and AWS include a standard framework for cloud migration that is not specifically tailored to any company-specific migration requirements. And even firms that do put the effort into customizing on top of those standard frameworks may find that, over time, services and capabilities that initially supported the business no longer reflect the firm’s evolving size, complexity and priorities.
An experienced MSP provider can optimize cloud utilization on an ongoing basis and anticipate new requirements before your infrastructure falls behind your IT maturity level. For example, let’s assume your existing data management is built around technology like Microsoft SQL Server. On your own, you might try to lift and shift the same legacy database to the cloud. But the right MSP can help you instead set up a cloud-native platform that integrates with machine learning (ML) and other forms of artificial intelligence (AI) out of the box. This allows you to perform advanced data analytics and gain new customer insights without needing to hire a roomful of data scientists.
How MSP Partnerships Deliver More Value and Benefits from the Cloud
With the help of an MSP partner, organizations can utilize cloud models to remove IT complexity and retire legacy data centers and siloed infrastructures that hold back innovation. In its place are more agile, scalable and cost-effective systems to run operations and rapidly prototype, develop and deploy new services in a SaaS-based, cloud ecosystem.
Additional benefits include better decision support from improved consolidation, management and visibility of data. The cloud brings all data together into a single, unified and actionable view across the business – one that allows financial firms to truly understand and analyze business and customer needs. All of these benefits are within reach, as the MSP handles the complexities of rapidly engineering new applications and workflows to seize on new market opportunities.
For organizations that understand the need for an MSP partner to maximize their investment in the cloud, the question turns to choosing the right one. To begin with, look for MSPs that offer pay-as-you-go cloud models that let you manage costs and free up investment in new services and applications. And insist on MSP alignment with all relevant industry standards and compliance rules– including ISO, CIS, NIST, and regulations such as SEC and FINRA.
ECI provides all these attributes and more. We’re highly specialized to the financial industry, and as a Microsoft Gold Partner, we have extensive experience across the entire Microsoft stack as well as deep project development and service management capabilities with AWS. Learn more about why alternative investment firms trust ECI as the MSP of choice to drive value and growth in the cloud: in our Innovation Made Easy whitepaper.
