Author: Howard M. Cohen
From the perspective of professional prowess, there’s really very little difference between your doctor who keeps your body healthy and your MSP who keeps your workloads healthy. Just as the “general practitioner” has evolved into many specializations, you can expect your MSP to follow the same path. As they do, you’ll want to be sure you have all your fundamentals covered. Your best MSP will agree that outsourcing basics like cloud workload management is your best strategy now and in the future.
We’ve all heard the advice to “never try to be all things to all people.” And it’s good advice! It’s hard and expensive to be all things to all people and provide excellent quality and value in everything you do.
Conversely, it’s not advisable to use service providers who try to be all things to people. Such people are often referred to as “jack of all trades and master of none.” You cannot expect everything to be done to your satisfaction, and that can result in tremendous disappointment and excessive cost to re-do what was not done properly in the first place.
What Are Your Options When You Require Multiple Skills?
Just about every IT project you can think of requires multiple skill sets. You need networking experts, server operating system experts, security experts, storage experts, application development experts, application delivery specialists, and application protection experts. And more!
To assemble the right team for your project you have a few approaches available to you:
- You can conduct your own search for providers of each skill set. Of course, you’ll need to subsequently assure they can all work well together.
- You can engage a reputable project manager who has developed relationships with a wide variety of experts from each of the disciplines required.
- You can work with a partner whose expertise is in the core skills required for your project, and who has demonstrable skill and experience at selecting subcontractors while maintaining project control on your behalf.
This last choice has long been the core strategy in the Microsoft Partner EcoSystem. Microsoft Partners are encouraged to declare their focus and partner with other Microsoft Partners who have declared other areas of focus to complete complex projects requiring multiple skill sets. Microsoft refers to it as partner-to-partner (P2P) partnering and it has long been the hallmark of this community. Customers have long benefitted from the advantage of having coordination between partners built-in to the program.
Enter Azure
The Azure Cloud Service added so tremendous an array of additional services that it made a difficult challenge appear even more challenging. Each new service required new skills, and technologists made their choices as to where they should each specialize.
The Microsoft Partner Program very capably absorbed the shock of this mammoth increase. With an ecosystem designed to encourage P2P, and enable partners to readily evaluate each other’s offerings and quality, the broad new world of Azure grew seamlessly within the community.
Handling the Fundamentals
Technologists, by nature, love to challenge themselves. As a result, most of them seek to specialize in the more exotic technologies that call for their full measure of brilliance.
Others saw a vacuum forming at the foundation. Who would assure the performance of the fundamental systems that support all the others?
The Idenxt Team set out to fill this void. Idenxt services are uniquely designed to enable, manage, and protect applications and workloads running on the Azure service, using a combination of automation solutions combined with human expertise. Microsoft Partners from across the ecosystem remain focused on their chosen area of expertise while entrusting application protection to Idenxt, with knowledge that the entire team has long, extensive experience in the Microsoft Partner Ecosystem.
To learn more about staying focused on your core skills and entrusting the fundamentals to a trustworthy partner, contact us here.