#93 Joseph Landes: Three biggest challenges MSPs face in cloud migration

It’s a big world out there for the Managed Service Provider (or MSP.)

There are dozens, if not hundreds of different solutions for every problem a customer might be facing, but one thing is for certain.

The cloud is here, and it’s not going anywhere.

Joseph Landes is the Chief Revenue Officer at Nerdio, and was a guest on the Ecosystem Aces podcast recently. He came on the show specifically to talk about what he does at Nerdio, how they help onboard MSPs to Microsoft Azure and the 3 biggest challenges that are most commonly faced by those MSPs when trying to migrate to public cloud services like Azure.

It’s Too Expensive

This is a common pain point that a lot of MSPs have when they’re presented with moving their services to a cloud provider like Azure.

But expensive isn’t necessarily talking about the actual price of Azure.

Say you’re an MSP in Bakersfield, and you service a clientele that is all within a few miles of you. You may not have anybody in your company skilled in making the switch to Azure, so you’re faced with a couple of options.

You can either a) hire someone to come in and be embedded with your company and help make the switch, or b) retrain your existing staff on what it looks like to make that transition.

Neither of those is particularly cost-effective. So when MSPs talk about the migration to Azure being too expensive, they’re not always talking about the cost of the actual product.

It’s Complicated

It’s true that Azure isn’t just 1 service. It’s not a singular piece of software that someone deploys. It’s hundreds of services spread across multiple channels. So the argument that “it’s complicated” may come with some truth.

There is a certain level of complexity involved with the migration of this magnitude that your average IT staff may not be familiar with and needs to learn.  

But too complicated? That’s why Joseph and his team at Nerdio are there. To help walk you through it.

It’s Risky

This is the most common challenge Joseph and his team hear.

It’s just too risky.

But what a customer might really mean isn’t that it’s “risky.” They may mean that it’s “not what they’re used to.”

They’re used to the world of deploying on-prem backups and storage solutions. Of buying a server, installing it for a client, and then managing, monitoring, securing, and servicing that server.

They’re moving from a model of “We’re charging you X for this piece of hardware and service contract” to “We’re charging you based on your usage.”

Welcome to the world of cloud consumption. The “risk” starts to come when the organization thinks “Well what if the customer uses too much? Am I just eating that cost? Or what if they don’t use enough and this doesn’t make financial sense?”

At the end of the day, it can be complicated. But Joseph and his team at Nerdio have made it their mission to be the definitive solution for Microsoft Azure deployment, pricing, packaging, management, and optimization.

Listen to the podcast here.

To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to the Ecosystem Aces Podcast, or visit our dedicated Ecosystem Aces page.

‍

Hosted by Chip Rodgers, VP Marketing at WoTo contact the host, Chip Rodgers, with topic ideas, suggest a guest or join the conversation about alliances, he can be reached by:

• Email: chip@workspan.com
• Twitter: @chiprodgers
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chiprodgers