Webinar: Accelerate Your Cloud Business With CloudHealth

Editor's Notes

• #8: The widespread adoption of AWS’ services and the corresponding shift from traditional on-premises data centers to hyperscale cloud solutions has created a significant new paradigm for managed service providers (MSPs). Customers are becoming increasingly aware of the value of cloud services and with this heightened awareness comes the desire to partner with providers who can guide them toward innovative business solutions and high performance environments. These customers are asking less for technical solutions to specific concerns and are increasingly looking toward business outcome focused solutions. The service providers best positioned to deliver this are those who have built or revamped their businesses to enable their customers to take advantage of cloud native functionality and who are able to deliver a full customer engagement lifecycle: plan/design >> build/migrate >> run >> optimize.
• #9: CloudHealth provides service providers a single pane of glass, with visibility across your customer’s data center, private cloud, and all AWS accounts for cost, usage, performance, and security. The CloudHealth Migration Assessment simplifies the process of migrating assets from data centers to Amazon Web Services, enabling partners to efficiently assess and model workloads, including TCO, for migration on behalf of their customers and accelerate the cloud migration process. Partners can efficiently run and operate the management of their customers’ AWS environment with policy-driven governance and automation around cost, usage, performance and security to reduce management overhead requirements. CloudHealth enables partners to proactively monitor, report and assess their customers’ AWS environment, and provide tailored recommendations for optimization opportunities. 
• #10: Leveraging the power of CloudHealth, Blue Sentry and LogicBay identified several opportunities for rightsizing and Reserved Instances. LogicBay took the recommendations and is realizing significant cost savings in AWS spend and a new level of confidence. It was then able to reinvest in its business and purchase another third-party tool.
• #11: What it means for you
• #12: Key Point: Examples - We will happily train you on how to use our product as often as you like. But if you would like us to do the project for you we’re happy to do that as well.
• #13: Partner Console: Manage customers from one console: Switch between consolidated & per customer view Multi-cloud support: Major public clouds and resources in the data center Simplified Customer Management: Customers are 1st tier object Partner can associate customers with all types of AWS accounts (i.e. consolidated, linked, standalone)
• #14: Highlight Dashboard: Single consolidated view across your entire cloud ecosystem (for your environment, all of your customers, or just one of your customers) 3 Pulse Reports Executive level reports Where partners can show quick time to value for customer trialing services and prove your value to their customers on an ongoing basis Cost/Usage/Perfomance Reporting Rightsizing RI Optimizer Governance: Policies allow partners to set up guardrails and manage your customer’s environment by exception We deliver Event Logs and CloudTrail integration to track changes across the environment Partner Console: Billing Rules Credits Billing Statements
• #15: Managed Services in the Hyperscale Cloud The widespread adoption of AWS’ services and the corresponding shift from traditional on-premises data centers to hyperscale cloud solutions has created a significant new paradigm for managed service providers (MSPs). Customers are becoming increasingly aware of the value of cloud services and with this heightened awareness comes the desire to partner with providers who can guide them toward innovative business solutions and high performance environments. These customers are asking less for technical solutions to specific concerns and are increasingly looking toward business outcome focused solutions. The service providers best positioned to deliver this are those who have built or revamped their businesses to enable their customers to take advantage of cloud native functionality and who are able to deliver a full customer engagement lifecycle: plan/design >> build/migrate >> run >> optimize. The shift from on-premises The shift from on-premises to cloud has opened new doors for Next Gen MSPs to create high value solutions and to uniquely position themselves as trusted advisors to their customers through their full lifecycle capabilities. “Your mess for less” >> Design, architect, automate The traditional role of an MSP has emphasized the running and operating of existing environments, but this is no longer the right model for AWS customers. As customers become more experienced and knowledgeable in their use of these services, they are moving beyond the most obvious benefits of using the AWS cloud (i.e. cost optimization) and they are looking for experts to help them unlock agility and innovation in their business. These customers are looking for MSPs with deep expertise to consult with them, then design and implement highly automated and intelligent solutions, then continue to ensure that those solutions deliver an outstanding experience on an ongoing basis. Customers are increasingly opposed to patching together a network of providers to create these solutions and they are a looking for a partner-provider who can manage their full experience. Hardware based solutions >> Software/Cloud based solutions MSPs are no longer tied to hardware based solutions with capacity planning needs and lengthy equipment refresh cycles. Next Gen MSPs are instead approaching their customers’ needs with a cloud first strategy. They understand that the value of AWS cloud services expands well beyond the early dialogue about cost savings and CapEx versus OpEx, and they are focused on delivering rich solutions that allow their customers to leverage the full advantages of the AWS cloud to rapidly meet the needs of their businesses. Centralized operations >> Distributed operations and resources The operational needs of Next Gen MSPs has also evolved significantly from the earlier days of the fishbowl style NOC, staffed with a centralized team, or even onsite resources at a customer’s location or data center. They are moving away from a management-by-exception approach, with significant requirements for human intervention when something goes awry, to a truly proactive approach with cloud native solutions that are well designed from the start and are highly automated and increasingly self-healing. When manual processes are needed, these MSPs are able to implement fixes by manipulating code from any location where they can access the internet. This is a significant value to the MSP, who has reduced staffing needs and complexities, as well as to the end customer whose resolution is achieved more rapidly. Device based SLAs >> Solution/Application based SLAs Traditional MSP SLAs have been focused on the performance of hardware and infrastructure, which is of course moot in cloud solutions, as well as data accessibility and support response times. AWS handles the management of the underlying hardware, with highly available and accessible infrastructure achieved through well designed solutions, so this is no longer a relevant area for an MSP to focus its performance guarantees. This new generation of MSPs is instead able to create SLAs based on the performance of the application and the business outcomes which are best aligned with meeting the ultimate needs of their end customers. Complex, manual change management >> DevOps – CI/CD Change management has traditionally centered on capacity management, updates and security, and has often included manual processes that were both time and resource intensive. Next Gen MSPs are adopting DevOps tools and practices that allow them to continually assess, implement, manage and track changes in exponentially faster timeframes. They are able to utilize infrastructure-as-code in place of manual hardware and resource deployment and possess a CI/CD skillset that their customers can leverage. This facilitates an accelerated speed to production, allowing these MSPs to significantly improve their customers’ agility and deliver exceptional value. Static monitoring with fixed thresholds >> Dynamic monitoring with anomaly detection Monitoring is an area of significant evolution for Next Gen MSPs. Gone are the days of monitoring fixed thresholds in static environments. This approach addressed challenges of capacity planning, alerting of performance issues, and facilitation of root cause analysis – all of which are solved in AWS solutions. Well-designed environments will leverage infrastructure as code to auto scale and self-heal, allowing infrastructure to be treated as disposable. We are now in an era of dynamic, highly scalable environments with monitoring tools that leverage machine learning and predictive analytics to understand a customer’s environment and detect anomalies before performance is impacted. Top performing MSPs are embracing this approach and delivering significantly improved performance and intelligence to their customers. Security risk mitigation >> Security by design Managed Security Service Providers (MSSPs) no longer have exclusive purview in the outsourced management of security devices and systems. There is an increasing convergence of the role of the MSSP with that of the broader MSP in cloud based and cloud native environments. Customers expect their MSP to have strong security expertise and the ability (and experience) to meet the regulatory and compliance needs of their business – including reporting capabilities for continuous compliance. The Next Gen MSP is able to design customer solutions from the start to meet these needs, then implement and continually manage those solutions. Outsourcing vendor >> Trusted advisor and partner The paradigm shift in how Next Gen MSPs are evolving their businesses to address the needs of their customers and their ability to deliver in all phases of the customer engagement lifecycle has allowed them to move from being one of many outsourced vendors, supporting a finite portion of a solution. They are now able to move into a position of a truly trusted advisor who consults, designs, implements and takes ownership of the customer’s environments and experience. This allows the MSP and the customer to function as partners with long term and rewarding engagement potential. Differentiation/Conclusion At the end of the day, customers are looking for cloud experts who understand them, their specific industry, their regulatory and compliance needs, their business needs, and their workloads. They need an MSP who can marry that understanding to a deep expertise in AWS and deliver agile solutions to meet those needs. A Next Gen AWS MSP can deliver this full experience in a way that has been elusive in traditional models. The AWS Managed Service Provider Program has been designed to help our partners achieve this level of service capability and to highlight to our customers those partners who can best deliver these well rounded experiences.
• #16: The AWS Managed Service Partner Program is a bar-raising program created to identify and cultivate those partners who can best deliver next generation services to support their customers through their full engagement lifecycle: Plan & Design  Migrate & Build  Run  Optimize. AWS MSPs are the independently verified go-to-partners to deliver that experience. The program entails a 3rd party audit that assesses a partner’s capabilities in each of the areas listed. This allows a thorough understanding of the customer experience that can be delivered by the MSP, as well as an opportunity for best practice sharing with the partner as part of the consultative audit process. Most partners tout the guidance received during their audit process as one of the greatest values of the program. Here’s how CloudHealth helps you close the gap in getting through AWS Managed Service Program Validation / Audit AWS evaluated core CloudHealth features and how they enable next generation MSP to build capabilities that are covered during the AWS Managed Service Provider Validation / Audit. Here are just a few examples of how CloudHealth enables MSP partners to meet mandatory requirements and gain additional credit under the AWS Managed Service Provider Validation / Audit CloudHealth Security Recommendations CloudHealth delivers security recommendations functionality that will compare your customer’s AWS infrastructure against AWS and CIS Best Practices. The platform identifies and reports on gaps, alerts stakeholders and provides recommended remediation. Partners who use CloudHealth’s security recommendations allow MSPs to check the box in three mandatory requirements in the Security Management section of the AWS MSP Validation checklist, and can get you bonus points in four optional requirements in the Solution Design Capabilities and Security & Service Desk sections. CloudHealth Partner Billing & Reporting CloudHealth enables you to create, customize and share a whole host of usage, cost and performance analysis reports. One best practice is to provide some basic reports as part of a “freemium” service that all of your customers receive. Partners who leverage CloudHealth’s Partner Billing and Reporting allow MSPs to check the box for a mandatory requirement in the Billing & Cost Management section along with getting you bonus points in three optional requirements in Billing & Cost Management and Service Reporting sections. In addition, CloudHealth recently was provided an AWS Migration Competency which can help MSPs assess workloads and applications in a datacenter or private cloud and determine the right AWS EC2 instances to run the workloads and at what cost. In combination with a third party “lift and shift” tool or process, partners can meet the mandatory application migration capability. CloudHealth has a robust technology alliance ecosystem, and can help align you with the right partner for your organization to help you meet this important requirement in the Infrastructure & Application Migration Capabilities section of the audit.