Managed service providers play a crucial role in bridging the gap between traditional on-premise IT and modern cloud solutions. As organisations grapple with the complexities of cloud adoption and the scarcity of skilled professionals, they increasingly turn to specialised external providers for support, and the trend is not solely driven by cost-saving measures but also by the need to comply with evolving regulations and to ensure the reliability of their IT operations.
As one industry expert, Shaun Whalon, vice-president of services for Ireland at Presidio, said: “We see it in the market, we see people working with specialist outside providers.”
This trend is driven by several factors, including the growing complexity of IT environments and the skills shortage faced by many organisations.
Key among the skills in short supply are cloud-crucial ones, including management of infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS), which are inherently more complex than software as a service (SaaS), as well as cloud-native application development.
Naturally, organisations that have hitherto focused on on-premise IT will benefit from assistance – and that encompasses a lot of organisations. “Not everybody is native to the cloud, so there is a need to bridge the gap,” Whalon said.
However, Whalon pointed out, despite the attention given to cloud – much of it deserved – it is nonetheless very far from being the only destination for workloads.
Indeed, he said, even Amazon Web Services (AWS), easily one of the two largest cloud providers, has said so.
In fact, AWS chief executive Adam Selipsky has weighed in on the issue by saying he estimates that only ten to 15 per cent of the global computation workload is in the cloud. Speaking to Partner Insight, Selipsky said that cloud was still in its early days, but that this was obscured by the fact that a lot of money was known to be spent on cloud services.
“There’s been a lot of dollars that have moved to the cloud, but they forget that there are a lot of IT dollars spent in the world: there’s maybe several trillion dollars spent of [sic] IT per year,” Selipsky said.
Beyond the potential for growth in cloud, however, this means that on-premise systems still need to be managed, and this runs directly into other skills shortages including cyber security.
Not everybody is native to the cloud, so there is a need to bridge the gap
“Customers have their legacy co-location and on-premise, and they have a skills shortage there. There really is a scarcity problem. If you put the term ‘cyber’ in front of anything today you get a shortage though,” Whalon said.
When turning to a managed service provider, organisations do not only want to get the benefit of technical skills that would otherwise not be available to them, however. Other issues where they can benefit from outside expertise include gaining efficiencies, naturally, but regulation is also playing a growing role, Whalon said.
This is particularly the case here in the European Union, given the growth of regulations including the Digital Operations Resilience Act (DORA), the Artificial Intelligence Act (EU AU Act), the updated Network and Information Security Directive (NIS2), and even the old chestnut that is the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
“What does a customer, be they public or private, outsource? Everybody is looking to save money, but it’s not the only reason they do it. The other thing we see, because Presidio is a global player, is differences between Europe – the EU – and elsewhere, be it DORA or NIS2, or even something now as old as GDPR, drives relationships,” he said.
Overall, the importance of getting the right support to keep crucial IT functioning is increasingly obvious to organisations ranging from SMEs to government departments and local authorities right up to large multinationals, he said.
Ultimately, for Presidio as a provider of IT services, he said, understanding the differences in the market, be they vendors, infrastructure type, or even competitors, is crucial.
These differences often depend on the specific needs and requests of customers, Whalon said: “As a provider of these services, we see differences between competitors in the market depending on the ask."