MSPs Can Be Midmarket Heroes On Cloud Migrations, Gartner Analyst Says

Dorosh offered for his audience three reasons MSPs can help midmarket customers:

  • They have people who are trained and have the certified skills specific to cloud providers that are currently in high demand;
  • They bring automation, architecture and operational capabilities to support your workloads; and
  • Many can also provide migration support and service brokerage capabilities.

Dorosh also advised midmarket IT leaders to "try before you buy" in the MSP space.

MSPs are also helping midmarket clients deal with the complexity that can come with migrating applications into a cloud environment, according to Dorosh.

Because those applications, which have been run in-house, "have become very complex, and their relationships have become very complex," a business must do something to the app or its management "to make it work in the new environment," he said. If a business is moving from a VMware environment, for example, to AWS or Azure, "there's a significant difference," which can lead to some application refactoring before having it run in the new environment.

That leads some midmarket IT leaders to say, for instance, "I want to hire somebody that can help me migrate and do the heavier refactoring, the rearchitecting of the environment," to get the best out of it, which leads him or her to call on an MSP.