What is a managed cloud service?

A managed cloud service provides IT management of your hosted cloud platforms and applications, allowing you to decide how much your team does and how much you outsource. If you do not have an IT team, you can outsource all the work. If you have a small IT team, you can outsource the time-consuming manual tasks, freeing time for more strategic activity. Even enterprises can benefit by adding expertise without expanding the payroll.

To understand the benefits of managed cloud services, we first must understand the difference between cloud applications and cloud hosting.

Cloud applications and examples

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is a common description of a cloud application. Some well-known examples include:

• A customer relationship management program (CRM) like SalesForce
• Dropbox
• Gmail
• Google Analytics
• Hubspot
• Amazon Web Services
• DocuWare
• Ricoh Smart Integration

Of course, there are many, many others. Generally, you can access these applications from anywhere, all you need is an internet connection and the appropriate login credentials.

With cloud applications, you need an administrator, someone to manage who has access to the system and their level of access (user, administrator, etc…). What you don’t need is anyone to setup, partition a drive, load software and applications, or manage technical elements like software updates. That is all handled by the application provider – and that typically includes training and employee support too.

Cloud hosting is different

Cloud hosting features a server and network infrastructure typically run from a data center where software partitions a single piece of hardware. It may include a hosted application, like a Microsoft 365®. Often, it simply features multiple, often virtual servers setup for optimized load balancing to prevent downtime.

Effectively, you move your network server into the cloud, giving you greater flexibility and ease to expand (or reduce) capacity as needed. In the case of a Microsoft 365®, both your email server and software run from the cloud. You may still need to load applications locally to laptops.

The advantages are numerous. A few big ones are:

• You have cost savings with less hardware to manage, upgrade, and update.
• Your IT team has more time not managing hardware related issues.
• Being offsite, you have a natural business continuity plan in place. If you need to leave the office, you can still access all your business tools from your company laptop or configured home computer with a VPN connection.

The thing about most cloud hosting is, you still need technical expertise to configure and manage the systems. You need someone who can configure your servers. Someone must load your company-specific applications that do need to be on your server. Someone needs to load the local PC applications that connect with your applications. You need IT.

And that’s why managed cloud services continue to grow in popularity, especially today.

Source : https://www.ricoh-usa.com/en/insights/articles/8-benefits-of-managed-cloud-services