What is a Managed Service Provider and How Does it Relate to Cloud Services?

Learn about the difference between managed service providers & cloud service providers & how they can help your business.

What is a Managed Service Provider and How Does it Relate to Cloud Services?

Managed cloud services are services that provide partial or complete management of a customer's cloud resources or infrastructure. Management responsibilities can include migration, configuration, optimization, security, and maintenance. A managed service provider (MSP) is a third-party company that remotely manages a customer's information technology (IT) infrastructure and end-user systems. MSPs provide active management at customer premises, in their own data center (hosting), or in a third-party data center.

Pure MSPs focus on a single vendor or technology, usually their own core offerings. For many companies, a qualified managed service provider makes a difference. From hands-on support to the continuous operation of workloads, Google Cloud MSPs offer a catalog of managed and project-based services that help customers reduce their costs and time to market. In some cases, the vendor configures and manages workloads in the customer's data center and the customer doesn't touch it.

The evolution of MSPs began in the 1990s with the emergence of application service providers (ASPs), which offered a service level for remote application hosting. Large corporations and businesses, such as government agencies, will hire a managed service provider when they have budget and contracting constraints. The managed service provider enables companies with no IT experience to improve their daily operations and avoid IT maintenance issues. The term MSP traditionally applied to infrastructure- or device-centric types of services, but it has been expanded to include any service that offers ongoing management, maintenance, and support.

Managed service providers can use Avi to deliver, protect and manage their applications on behalf of customers. When a company does not have the resources to employ an IT team dedicated to managing development, maintenance and fault correction, those needs are outsourced to a managed IT service provider. So what is the difference between managed service providers and cloud service providers? A cloud service provider is responsible for providing access to cloud computing resources such as storage, networking, databases, analytics, and more. They are responsible for managing the underlying infrastructure that supports these services. On the other hand, managed service providers are responsible for managing the applications and services that run on top of this infrastructure.

They are responsible for ensuring that these applications are running optimally and securely. In conclusion, managed service providers are responsible for managing applications and services on top of cloud infrastructure while cloud service providers are responsible for providing access to cloud computing resources such as storage, networking, databases, analytics, etc.

Lynne Ellert
Lynne Ellert

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