Why is the Cloud Solution Provider Program interesting for my business

Well, one reason could be the skills gap that exists today in IT. There is an enormous shortage of skilled people. A gap that continues to grow every day, and sadly, skilled, and trained individuals is one of the things businesses need to succeed in the public cloud. 

As a business, you then have 2 options: one you can try and get as many of those scarce resources into your camp as much as possible. However, chances are you will end up in a bidding war with the competition and end up paying way too much for resources that have a considerable risk of leaving anyway for a better deal. 

An alternative is to outsource certain IT functions to an external party. This is called a managed services model and is a distinct kind of outsourcing that covers all IT functions. 

Benefits

Focus on your core business. 

When several of those IT functions and concerns are outsourced to a managed service provider, your focus can shift to the core functions of your business. If you are an orange dealer, your focus should be on selling oranges instead of worrying about the backup system of your file server. If you are creating the next electric supercar, you want to be turning knobs and bolts in the manufacturing plant, and not invest time in building and maintaining a CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. Let the MSP (Managed Service Provider) worry and take responsibility for that, while you free up your internal resources and human capital to focus on your core business, helping the company reach its goals. 

Build expertise on the things that matter. 

The Managed Service Provider offers you a service, so it is their job to have all the necessary skills to deliver that service. All the complexities of technical profiles, battling IT recruiters and competitors on LinkedIn for those scarce resources, and more, go away when you outsource it to your Managed Service Provider. You just pay for the service delivered, and the MSP will take responsibility for all the rest. The added bonus is that you are less susceptible to the risks of employee turnover. A risk that is very real, according to recent studies that say of 70% of millennial business leaders believe it is particularly important to work for a company or organization that keeps up with software and application trends. When people leave your company, your outsourced IT services will remain functioning, since it is the MSP’s responsibility to sustainably deliver the service, and not some secret that lives in an employee’s head that disappears when they walk out the door. 

Seventy percent of millennial business leaders believe it is particularly important to work for a company or organization that keeps up with software and application trends. 

Efficient cost structures 

Many business leaders have learnt during the COVID-19 pandemic, that they need to fundamentally rethink and change how they operate. Organizations that are successful in navigating these changes have one thing in common: they are resilient. The Boston Consulting Group has released a study that explains businesses need to build in resilience on several dimensions; one being the strengthening of their financials. The need to ensure financial liquidity with an operating expenditure-driven cost model, reduced total cost of ownership, and data-enabled policies to manage cash and working capital. So, gone are the days of making large capital expenditure upfront, to support functions that are not core to your business. There is no need to invest upfront in large training programs, buying licenses, acquiring hardware and software. The Managed Service model brings you to the age of Operational Expenditure (OPEX) which allows you to only pay for what you need and use. Need to scale your costs down because of, let us say, an international pandemic? No worries, your MSP can scale with your business, up and down, on a monthly or even daily basis. 

Research shows that investments in key digital resilience levers result in aggregated cost savings of 15 to 25 percent. 

The Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider Program 

A registered Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) is a service provider that offers value-added services on top of Microsoft Cloud products like Azure, Dynamics, and Microsoft 365. This allows customers to not only buy those public cloud services from such a provider, but also combine those with a basic starting set of managed services of that same MSP. This gives you the extra benefit of combining not only your public cloud costs, but also the services that the MSP delivers with it. Additionally, a CSP partner offers: 

• 24/7 local support with a premier escalation path to Microsoft. 
• Single point of contact for technical support and invoicing. 
• Monthly invoicing. 
• Pay for what you use, no upfront payments. 

Even more, if you still have the need to buy on-premises licenses and software, the Cloud Solution Provider can help you with that too, bringing it remarkably close to a ‘one-stop shop’ experience for business trying to succeed in the public cloud. Everybody loves a “single throat to choke.” 😉