Security and systems monitoring are the latest in a long line of services that are seeing increased demand in today’s tech-driven world. As a result, managed service providers (MSPs) are interested in incorporating these services into their business portfolios, especially as cloud security takes precedence for their clients.
In order to offer integrated security and management solutions for multi-tenant environments, it’s important to consider the following five best practices:
Implementing Consolidated Solutions
A single consolidated platform featuring security, performance monitoring, and compliance services can go a long way towards improving efficiencies while eliminating potential bottlenecks in the collaborative decision-making process. Unlike disparate products that favor stovepipe solutions for individual problems, consolidated solutions can help lower returns on investment (ROI), reduce deployment costs, and relieve demand for scarce IT resources.
Having a consolidated solution also provides MSPs with the ability to evaluate and identify problems at the source with a greater level of ease and speed.
Support for Multiple Infrastructure Options
Limiting data to an on-premise data center can be a liability in today’s mobile environment. Any integrated security and management solution should have the ability to reside in a wide variety of physical and virtual infrastructures, including the different cloud architectures (public, private, and hybrid clouds).
Remote Management and Support
An ever-increasing number of companies are relying on data centers and major computing hubs located across the globe. Given the highly mobile and genuinely global nature of the tech environment, MSPs need to incorporate remote management and support capabilities into their security and management solutions.
Any remote management and support solution should also be able to effectively communicate with remote users’ systems without compromising security firewalls and other security solutions in place to prevent breaches. In addition, these solutions must also support Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies that are becoming increasingly popular.
Support for Multi-Tenant Architecture
Built-in support for multi-tenant architectures is essential for MSPs to get their money’s worth from their own infrastructures. A reliable and secure multi-tenant environment allows MSPs to continue amortizing costs across numerous clients and effectively provide resource sharing without exposing vital data.
Compatibility With Major Virtualization Hypervisors
With more companies making inroads into the virtual machine (VM) hypervisor market, it is increasingly important for MSPs to embrace an agnostic solution capable of supporting a wide variety of hypervisors. This is true even if there are two or more hypervisors being used by the same organization to handle different VM workloads. Utilizing hypervisor-agnostic solutions makes it easier for MSPs to support a broad range of public, private, and hybrid cloud-computing architectures.
Integrated solutions that focus on performance monitoring, security, and compliance are swiftly becoming an essential part of an MSP’s repertoire, and such solutions can also become recurring revenue streams. As a result, MSPs must be able to provide capabilities that meet the complex challenges faced by clients on a regular basis, with support for a broad range of infrastructure designs under a wide variety of data hosting situations.
If you want to learn more about eXemplify’s integrated security and management solutions, contact us and speak to one of our cloud strategy experts.