Cloud computing and adoption of cloud services is on the rise, and managed service providers (MSPs) are taking advantage of the uptake by offering new and specialized services. And more and more service providers are discovering that as they take over certain aspects of the network, including data storage, backup, disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity operations, they are left with access to extraordinary amounts of big data.
The promise of big data is nothing new, and service providers are increasingly coming up with ways to manage, monitor and analyze it, which is beneficial to themselves and their customers. A new TechTarget - Computer World survey shows that cloud service adoption is expected to grow from 17.9 to 28.5 percent for the 1,300 IT professionals surveyed during the next six months. Those numbers represent increased adoption of DR and backup services, business continuity and desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) offerings.
As companies move to offsite service providers and data center offerings for their data management, they no longer have to rely on costly and antiquated in-house backup systems. But perhaps an even bigger benefit is having fairly easy and quick access to massive amounts of actionable data. That data could indicate important business trends and show points of strength and weakness. Enterprises may gain valuable insight into customer preferences as well as plans of action for sales and marketing teams.
Service providers can generate reports for their customers using a variety of parameters to sort through the data. This benefits customers, but can also benefit service providers themselves as they better understand which areas their customers are interested and can shift data storage locations accordingly. By continuously analyzing how data is being stored, accessed and managed, cloud providers and MSPs can come up with increasingly energy and cost efficient ways to handle and manage that data.
A recent blog post from LogicWorks, a company offering managed services and cloud computing solutions, outlines five ways in which service providers can make the most of their big data strategies within the cloud. By understanding the scope of the big data project as well as coming up with ultimate goals for that data on both the customer and services facing side as well as the service provider/cloud facing side, service providers may maximize their costs and productivity. Service providers may then increase their footprints accordingly to handle the amount of data they anticipate.
Similarly, building a cloud foundation with the efficient management of big data in mind is also crucial. Data amounts will only continue to increase, so MSPs and cloud service providers must ensure they can cost effectively and efficiently scale their operations to handle future needs and requirements. Providers must also have a solid plan in place for the management of petabytes upon petabytes of data, even if they don't have that much data to deal with at the onset of their project.
Most importantly, perhaps, providers should plan ahead to handle big data within their cloud computing environment. By ensuring they have the proper infrastructure in place to handle exponential growth, they can map out a solid strategy for handling big data, and then move on to the lucrative process of strategically analyzing that data to benefit themselves and their customers.
Edited by
Brooke Neuman
