The Evolution of the Managed Service Provider (MSP) – From the Past to the Cloud


AllCloud Blog:
Cloud Insights and Innovation

In the past, the concept of providing a service involved much more than inventing and designing the service, itself. The appropriate amount and quality of hardware was required for every company to not only build their service, but have and adequate amount of space to hold and maintain the hardware for the life of each service, as well. Fortunately, that on-premise era is slowly but surely passing, leaving those rather dated companies still attempting to manage their own server rooms, hung out to dry.

The Colocation

A few years later, colocation service providers solved the storage and maintenance issues by providing actual warehouses to store provided hardware. This transformation in the world of MSPs enabled companies to focus more on developing and enhancing their services, and less, if at all, on the headaches caused by hardware. Moving right along, the following level of managed service providers took a giant leap forward by even offering their own colocation hardware. This left companies solely responsible for their applications’ deployment.

One Stop CAPX Shop

The time consuming hassle that once was hardware maintenance disappeared in the blink of an eye, however the revolution didn’t stop there. On top of MSPs owning and maintaining all of the necessary hardware, an even further step forward included the actual deployment and management of the provided services or applications. These MSPs took full responsibility of ensuring a service or application’s existence, abiding by the applicable SLA from top to bottom.  What more could you wish for? With the weight of hardware and deployment management on the shoulders of the MSP, all of the bases seem to be covered…but at what cost? The aforementioned levels of service providers display wonderful achievements for the world of IT, unfortunately, each one also included a hefty capital expense and long term relationship. Today’s on-demand mentality does not allot the time or funds that are coupled with the risks involved in those more traditional user-MSP relationships.

The Modern Cloud MSP

Opportunely, the next generation of MSPs not only fully understands this way of thinking, they utilize it themselves. Companies, like Emind, use the giant public cloud resources, such as AWS and Google, to provide a completely managed service that is deployed and monitored on hardware that they, themselves, purchase on-demand from the cloud. There are no hardware constraints or capital expense risks involved. Emind’s strategy is to merely pass its risk free flexibility on to customers, consequently improving optimization due to the ability to select different types of instances.  The modern cloud MSP has an obligation to ensure that customers’ applications are run in an efficient manner.

SLA, Performance and Efficiency

By utilizing the cloud’s infrastructure, we are able to offer customers the most advanced and available resources across the globe, at an extremely attractive price. Our comprehensive knowledge of the cloud has granted us the honor of being completely transparent with our customers while providing the optimal cloud environment. Akin to other next generation MSPs, we provide our customers with a set of tools which are essential to managing a cloud dynamic environment. With a faster time to market, you will find yourself ahead of the game with doors opening left and right to greater innovation, DevOps culture and the speed and agility you’ve always dreamed of. Emind is not your typical MSP…we are the future of what MSPs should be.

Lahav Savir

Founder and CTO, Cloud Platforms

Read more posts by Lahav Savir