Where are MSP managed on-prem workloads moving?
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To me it looks like there are fewer and fewer reasons for SMBs to have their own servers and hardware as each day goes by. Both on-prem and colocated.
But where does the workloads go?
Is it common for MSPs to manage and own their own fleet of servers and move the clients workloads to be hosted on the MSP's own hardware?
Or are MSPs moving the workloads to cloud servers hosted by other providers (vultr, digital ocean etc)?
Or are the MSPs perhaps migrating the workloads to the public cloud (AWS etc)?
Or are the SMB workloads moving to SaaS solutions instead? And the MSP sets up and manages the service for the SMB instead?
Or are the SMB's on-prem workloads just going to stay where they are?
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@pete-s a mix, where I currently work we ha e our own Colo and in office servers. A large number of our customers require on premise hardware for their offices, cloud servi es make sense for a lot, but not everything. Even colod workloads make little sense to a lot of our customers.
While it makes a ton of sense to move to hosted email, or even file shares, there are so many proprietary systems that business uses that aren't cloud ready.
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I've recently moved my email to M365, so SAAS for that.
We're about to start planning our move of file share data to Sharepoint/ODfB - again SAAS.That leaves me with two items left on-prem - and old EMR I have to keep alive for at least 2 more years and our accounting software.
Additionally, we have a laboratory interface for some of our testing equipment that only runs on Windows Server (legally) so that needs to live somewhere as well.We'll definitely keep the old EMR on-prem until we retire it.
It looks like we can buy a hosted solution of BusinessWorks if we really want to go that route - it's slow as molasses over a VPN connection pulls all kinds of data down locally - very old school solution. So for good performance I'd assume we'd have to remote into a desktop that's more local to the host of BusinessWorks, driving the price up.
I'd love to move the laboratory software to a tiny 'nix box, lock it down and forget about it - basically only allowing it to talk to a control IP inside my network and the Lab itself, but again, the software is for Windows only. I suppose I can do the same with Windows, but that would require potentially 3 licenses so I don't have to worry about VPNs back to a central server for all three locations.
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@dustinb3403 said in Where are MSP managed on-prem workloads moving?:
Even colod workloads make little sense to a lot of our customers.
If you've seen Scott's old posts, that doesn't really seem possible - unless the cost of a big pipe between the colo and you is to expensive.
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@dashrender said in Where are MSP managed on-prem workloads moving?:
I've recently moved my email to M365, so SAAS for that.
We're about to start planning our move of file share data to Sharepoint/ODfB - again SAAS.That leaves me with two items left on-prem - and old EMR I have to keep alive for at least 2 more years and our accounting software.
Additionally, we have a laboratory interface for some of our testing equipment that only runs on Windows Server (legally) so that needs to live somewhere as well.We'll definitely keep the old EMR on-prem until we retire it.
It looks like we can buy a hosted solution of BusinessWorks if we really want to go that route - it's slow as molasses over a VPN connection pulls all kinds of data down locally - very old school solution. So for good performance I'd assume we'd have to remote into a desktop that's more local to the host of BusinessWorks, driving the price up.
I'd love to move the laboratory software to a tiny 'nix box, lock it down and forget about it - basically only allowing it to talk to a control IP inside my network and the Lab itself, but again, the software is for Windows only. I suppose I can do the same with Windows, but that would require potentially 3 licenses so I don't have to worry about VPNs back to a central server for all three locations.
Thanks, it does makes sense to move to SaaS solutions for a single customer that is doing their own IT.
But a MSP is in a different position because they, besides know-how, have a larger scale. So it can make economic sense to host things for their customers that doesn't make sense for each individual customer.
For instance does it makes sense for a company to have a server to host their website on? No, it doesn't. But if you're an MSP and your customers have a thousand websites that needs to live somewhere, it might make sense for you to host them.
I guess it also depends if you're an MSP that just manages things or if you also have your own hosting/cloud infrastructure or use another provider for that.
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@pete-s said in Where are MSP managed on-prem workloads moving?:
Thanks, it does makes sense to move to SaaS solutions for a single customer that is doing their own IT.
But a MSP is in a different position because they, besides know-how, have a larger scale. So it can make economic sense to host things for their customers that doesn't make sense for each individual customer.
For instance does it makes sense for a company to have a server to host their website on? No, it doesn't. But if you're an MSP and your customers have a thousand websites that needs to live somewhere, it might make sense for you to host them.
I guess it also depends if you're an MSP that just manages things or if you also have your own hosting/cloud infrastructure or use another provider for that.
All good points. I have no view into that world, the few ITSPs I know are using other companies solutions, not rolling their own, or even hosting their own. Though some of them, we'll take JB for example, do manage all the stuffs other than hypervisor and hardware for things like a Ubiquiti controller, and PBXs.
If you really do have need to host 1000's of websites (or really massive sites, it could make sense to manage the whole stack, but then again, it could be better to get services from someone like Vultr, or in extreme cases like Amazon/Azure.
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@dashrender said in Where are MSP managed on-prem workloads moving?:
@pete-s said in Where are MSP managed on-prem workloads moving?:
Thanks, it does makes sense to move to SaaS solutions for a single customer that is doing their own IT.
But a MSP is in a different position because they, besides know-how, have a larger scale. So it can make economic sense to host things for their customers that doesn't make sense for each individual customer.
For instance does it makes sense for a company to have a server to host their website on? No, it doesn't. But if you're an MSP and your customers have a thousand websites that needs to live somewhere, it might make sense for you to host them.
I guess it also depends if you're an MSP that just manages things or if you also have your own hosting/cloud infrastructure or use another provider for that.
All good points. I have no view into that world, the few ITSPs I know are using other companies solutions, not rolling their own, or even hosting their own. Though some of them, we'll take JB for example, do manage all the stuffs other than hypervisor and hardware for things like a Ubiquiti controller, and PBXs.
If you really do have need to host 1000's of websites (or really massive sites, it could make sense to manage the whole stack, but then again, it could be better to get services from someone like Vultr, or in extreme cases like Amazon/Azure.
It's possible that ITSP/MSPs in the SMB space in general don't own any infrastructure themselves.
I know large companies that fully outsource their workloads to service providers. Those service providers host the workloads primarily in their own datacenters but also on public cloud infrastructure. But these service providers are often large companies themselves so they have scale.
