The IT world as we know it is accelerating faster than we can say "Infrastructure as a Service." More and more businesses are realizing the benefits of moving their workloads to the cloud, and developing their new applications in a cloud-native way. In fact, by 2025 85% of organizations will follow a cloud-first approach!

What Does the Cloud Have to Do with MSPs?

Managed Service Providers provide organizations of all types with IT solutions for running their business. They are trusted advisors to bridge the gap between technology and business. 

With the steadily increasing importance of cloud connectivity, MSPs have to decide how to best continue to support their customers. For many customers, the IT services of the past decade can only partially fulfill their computing needs.  MSPs therefore face a choice: to take the leap and integrate modern cloud-native services into their offering or to continue to offer their traditional services and maintain their status quo.

But why is it so important for MSPs to offer modern cloud-native services? Let's take a look at just five of the reasons that MSPs should keep up with the changing of the seasons: 

5 Benefits of Cloud Connectivity for MSPs

Add Modern Web Services to Your Portfolio

When an MSP is able to provide managed web services, the building blocks of modern cloud-native applications are in-house. Their customers will be able to deploy through them with the low latency and high performance of localized infrastructure together with the ease of use of the public cloud. Through the MSP's own portal, customers will have access to compute infrastructure, containers, managed Kubernetes, object storage and all that's necessary to innovate and grow their business.

Stay on the Cutting Edge

With every passing day, more and more applications are being developed through microservices, including containers and Kubernetes. Customers are beginning to realize the tremendous benefit of these services, as cloud-natively built applications are generally faster and easier to build and maintain. As this industry develops, MSPs must keep up with the times so they can offer their customers the managed services that will support this new modus operandi.

Create New Revenue Streams

As with any business, when you offer new services/products, you create opportunities for new revenue streams. With advanced cloud services, MSPs are now able to offer a highly desirable and increasingly necessary product to their customers, both increasing revenue from their existing customers as well as attracting new ones. MSPs that provide cloud-native services will find themselves in the driver's seat as customers progress in their digital transformation journey.

Long-term Customer Retention

As businesses move towards cloud-native applications, customers will be looking for cloud solutions to support their new workloads. For the MSP, a simple solution could be to turn to the large public cloud providers. However, this is less than ideal as it shrinks the MSP's margins and in the long term detracts from their business. If an MSP can provide their customers with the cloud services that they seek, these customers will not have to look elsewhere, and will stay with their trusted MSP for a long time to come.

Monetize Existing Infrastructure

Managed Service Providers generally maintain their own servers. With no additional hardware and with minimal investment, the unused compute power and connectivity of these servers can be used for deploying cloud-native applications in-house. While the large public cloud providers benefit from economies of scale, MSPs can take advantage of locality to handle emerging location-dependent apps, such as the new wave of Internet of Things applications.

Partnering with MSPs: Ridge

MSPs partner with Ridge to expand their footprint and to add new revenue streams. Through a single API and without any installation, Ridge converts their underlying infrastructure into a cloud-native platform. Their customers benefit from a cloud customized for their specific throughput, locality, and commercial requirements. Ridge requires zero installation or CAPEX: it leverages the MSP's existing servers and runs application workloads on any IaaS, virtualization, or bare-metal machines. 

Cloud needs are changing. Ridge is a solution for MSPs looking to modernize and harness the cloud's full value.