The Secret to MSP Success: 3 Reasons to Partner With a Cloud Management Platform

Managed service providers have several challenges in their path when it comes to growing their cloud services. The average margins for reselling cloud services hover between three and seven percent. Meanwhile, the aggressive nature of the reseller market means that customer churn is high, and standing out from the competition can be difficult.

However, none of that has to spell out difficulty when it comes to turning a profit. MSPs have a number of tools at their disposal to help them increase margins, win new business, and retain the customers they have.

What’s the secret? As an MSP, partnering with a cloud management platform can help you grow your business. Namely, they can help you expand your cloud offerings, simplify billing operations, and stand out from the competition.

3 key reasons to partner with a cloud management platform like CloudCheckr:

1. Growing your cloud practice

As a partner with a cloud management platform, you gain visibility into your entire cloud architecture, whether it’s made up of one or multiple cloud environments. Your cloud management partners can help guide your cloud journey, no matter what your level of expertise.

Vendors can also provide the right guidance to help you ensure that your solutions are properly architected. If you’re an Amazon Web Services reseller, that includes consulting the guidelines of the AWS Well-Architected Framework. The Well-Architected Framework defines the five pillars of architectural excellence as Operational Excellence, Security, Reliability, Performance Efficiency,  and Cost Optimization.

CloudCheckr helps business partner Eplexity align their customers’ cloud environments with the Well-Architected Framework in one easy-to-use tool:

The robust system within CloudCheckr helps hit on different areas related to the Well-Architected Review. We can take that tool and plug it into the environment very quickly. It’s just a 30-minute conversation with the customer to enable features, walking them through the platform, and asking them to let us digest that information for the next 30 days. We deploy CloudCheckr and then are able to look at the data from multiple angles from a Well-Architected Framework to demonstrate where customers currently are and then have that conversation around where they want to be.”

Shiley Johnson, Director of Operations, Eplexity

2. Simplifying billing without losing discounts

Cloud billing is a notoriously difficult process for MSPs. For many, cloud billing involves time-consuming manual tasks that can take an entire business week or longer to complete. 

Additionally, MSPs can lose money when they can’t attribute costs for certain services to each customer. Because AWS consolidates billing for multiple accounts, allocating costs to end customers is challenging for MSPs.

Fortunately, MSPs can optimize their costs and find savings opportunities when they partner with a cloud management platform. Some of the billing and cost management tools that a cloud governance solution can provide include:

Uncompressing Pricing Tiers

Cloud providers often consolidate your costs into one charge. With a cloud management platform, you can split the cost and allocate charges to your users without losing on savings opportunities.

List Price Translation

Grouping cloud accounts means that individual accounts may pay far lower rates than they should. Using a tool that translates list pricing will help you charge the appropriate amount to each account without taking a loss for those bundled services.

Distribution of Credits and Discounts

Knowing which charges to pass on to customers is essential for MSPs. They may want to share the credits and discounts that their cloud vendors give them with their clients. A cloud management platform can help them re-rate bills to spread support costs and discounts among their customers. (Or they can opt to keep those discounts for themselves.)

Cloud Cost Optimization Tools

Other tools to optimize costs can help MSPs find discounts and recommend savings to increase their profitability, including Reserved Instance recommendations.

All of the above are features of CloudCheckr CMx, a robust cloud management platform. CloudCheckr offers billing and cost optimization tools, as well as automation capabilities, to help MSPs reduce time on billing and see greater transparency into their cloud costs.

“Before CloudCheckr, we might have spent upwards of two weeks breaking down the customers’ Detailed Billing Reports and reflecting costs back in an accurate way. Our account structure is much more streamlined now, integrating credits and custom charges, to ensure customers are charged accurately and we see better margins. These days the whole process takes us around a day or two, which is a dramatic difference.”

Mike Atkinson, Senior Cloud Engineer, JHC Technology

3. Enhancing your managed service brand

A cloud management partner provides you with the right tools for the job. But did you know that they can also serve as a business partner? Cloud management partners can give you an edge with your marketing and branding.

For example, cloud management solutions may offer white labeling for their services. This replaces their company’s name and logo on things like reports and dashboards with your own. White-labeled vendor solutions can help you provide a cohesive experience for your customers. This keeps your brand front and center in customers’ minds and reminds them of the value you’re adding to their IT services as they use these tools.

White-labeling is another key feature that CloudCheckr offers to MSPs. Business partners can set up the CloudCheckr console with their own logo and a custom URL.

Using the white-labeled version of CloudCheckr’s cloud management platform, Corne Du Preez, Technical Solution Professional for Cloud Infrastructure for Altron Karabina, was able to give a customer a complete view of their company-wide cloud spend for the first time ever.

“We see these kind of things on a daily basis when we talk to customers. We demo the product and they are basically shocked and say, ‘How did you guys do this?’ You feel like a magician.”

Corne Du Preez, Technical Solution Professional for Cloud Infrastructure, Altron Karabina

Growing your business with cloud management

Your cloud vendors are more than a source for the latest cloud technology. They are also crucial partners that can help you accelerate your business growth.

CloudCheckr’s business partner program is designed to help MSPs grow their cloud practice and their margins. As a CloudCheckr business partner, you get access to:

• Actionable data and insights from the CloudCheckr CMx dashboard, with a single view of multiple account families and data subsets
• Simplified billing and invoicing using Cost Allocator with Expense Assist, groups, tagging, custom reports, and other methods to save countless hours and make easier financial decisions
• Personalized consulting, training, co-marketing, and resources to rapidly accelerate your cloud growth and profits
• Co-branding capabilities and white-labeling services to show customers your subject matter expertise while using our solution

Learn more about CloudCheckr’s Business Partner Program and become a business partner today.

(Not a CloudCheckr user yet? Find out how CloudCheckr can help you cut cloud costs by as much as 30% with a free Cloud Check Up.)