We recently sat down with Marvin Sharp, the Vice President of Product & Strategy for hybrid multi-cloud managed service provider Aptum, to discuss the recent launch of the company’s enhanced tiers for its Managed Azure Cloud offerings. We also asked Marvin why organizations might need Managed Service Providers (MSPs) when they shift to the public cloud and what Aptum specifically brings to the table. Here’s what he had to say.
Why did Aptum launch enhanced tiers for its Managed Azure Cloud services?
As a hybrid multi-cloud managed service provider delivering complex solutions across a fully-managed, high performance network, we understand the importance of designing services that meet our customers’ needs. We know every company’s cloud journey is unique and our new three tiers of Managed Azure Cloud service offerings were designed to provide options for our customers, at every stage of their journey.
Can you describe the new tiers in more detail?
There are three tiers.
The Foundation tier is built for organizations with robust IT teams that need to fill in some skill gaps – for instance in Microsoft or Professional Services. It offers low-cost, reactive managed services and tools on a pay-per-ticket basis.
Our Advanced tier is more hands-on and is designed for organizations who lack cloud computing skills. It includes limited proactive monitoring and triaging along with guidance from experts.
The Premium tier provides a fully outsourced cloud management service and is ideal for organizations seeking to offload cloud operations and optimization. Aptum experts will proactively deliver continuous optimization and modernization, allowing customers to focus on their business and digital transformation.
Each tier also gives customers access to Aptum tools, programs and resources, including our Cost Insight Dashboard, 24×7 support and advisory services, allowing them to customize their cloud transformation to meet their specific needs.
Why do organizations need managed service providers (MSPs) to help them with public cloud services?
The public cloud offers a range of technical and business benefits, but it can also be complex. Without proper planning, organizations can spend more money than they expected, or not get the performance they need. For example, our Cloud Impact Study, which surveyed 400 senior IT professional in the U.S., U.K. and Canada, found 57% of respondents had encountered unexpected costs in the cloud.
MSPs like Aptum have experts who help customers plan their journey to the cloud, so they can avoid potential business disruptions, spend only on the services they require and meet their business objectives.
One of our customers, NEON Corp., a turnkey eCommerce platform and retail solutions provider, wanted to transition its IT infrastructure to Microsoft Azure Cloud to boost scalability and augment security. We worked closely with their IT team to optimize NEON’s eCommerce platforms for the Azure environment, ensuring they can grow their IT resources quickly to keep up with the demand for their services.
Does Aptum offer other cloud services? How are you different than other service providers out there?
We deliver a range of complex and high-performance cloud solutions with an integrated secure global network. One of our core principles is we tailor our solutions for each customer and put the right workloads in the right place for the right reason, because not all IT workloads work best on the same infrastructure. Some workloads operate best on a public cloud, others in a private cloud and some need an on-premises deployment.
We are a vendor-agnostic service provider with an IT infrastructure heritage spanning more than 20 years. We work with our customers to deliver infrastructure solutions that meet their business objectives and budget, whether it’s a legacy infrastructure, public cloud, private cloud or a combination of those.
We have four key pillars: Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), public cloud, private cloud, and professional services.
- IaaS is an all-in-one-offering that gives customers a combination of storage, web applications, database/big data, eCommerce and virtualization. We let customers choose a mix of the services they need to meet their data requirements.
- Our private cloud offering is a combination of managed services that we can set up in any data centre. It includes virtualization, backup, Managed Disaster Recovery as a Service – virtual servers that protect customer data in the event of an outage, Managed DevOps Service – which helps customers build cloud operations teams and Managed Detect and Response — which combines products from a suite of partners to help customers secure and monitor their data.
- Our managed public cloud services include Managed Azure and Managed AWS and within that our certified cloud experts offer cloud assessments, cloud strategic design and build, workload migration, day-to-day platform management and cloud connectivity.
- Through our professional services we offer security, infrastructure, cloud, managed IT, disaster recover and backup consulting, assessments, optimization, migrations, design/build and project management, all with flexible billing that lets customers choose a pricing model that best suits them.
These four pillars are all underpinned by our network service, which is a big differentiator for us. Not many MSPs have the regional network capabilities we do, including MPLS services, dedicated internal access and content delivery network.
Our solution set allows us to be adaptable and deliver the infrastructure services our customers need as they evolve.