At cross purposes in the cloud
Outsourced support providers must not compete with resellers, says Richard Eglon
According to IDC, demand for cloud and big data technologies has kick-started spending on storage infrastructure across EMEA. Cloud and big data requirements are expanding by the day – and so is the related complexity.
While companies scramble to find the right products and services for their storage requirements, they may also realise they do not have the right skills at hand to design, deploy and support new infrastructure.
Among the issues IT professionals should consider is the relationship between their reseller and its network of third-party support providers when dealing with the demands of storage.
Resellers must have the right relationships not only with support providers but with professional services and managed service providers to meet the demands of their customers' ever-changing support requirements.
Yet with so many IT support companies out there, it can be hard to choose the right one. References and case studies are vital, but so are professional accreditations.
One of the big issues facing IT professionals is keeping up with the pace of technology. Training and learning about innovations, even widely used ones such as cloud computing, cost time and money – two things often in short supply.
And cloud, as simple as it might sound as a concept, gets difficult to manage, especially if the storage location is unknown. Any data on the public cloud could be dispersed across different cloud providers, which might also have access to information.
How can you monitor who is looking at your data if you don't even know where that data is?
There is also no guarantee that cloud providers are actually managing data according to their customers' policies.
Private cloud too has its challenges: the whereabouts of the data may be known, but there is still a need for it to be maintained by professionals who know how to manage a data crisis if things go wrong in the cloud.
Trusted specialists will maintain the necessary best-practice ISO certifications.
Accreditations and case-study testimonials are important, but it is resellers that have to ensure their partners are not only qualified to do the job but accountable, trustworthy, and a natural extension to their overall services proposition.
The reputation of the reseller rests on its service; if they are outsourcing that service, its partners must want the reseller to succeed and grow too.
The channel isn't going to get that trusting relationship if its partner is trying to cross-sell direct to the end-user customer and make business deals on the side. Resellers already have enough competition.
Richard Eglon is marketing director at Comms-care