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5 Key Service Capabilities for Cloud Providers

Service providers have been running their operations like a cloud for years, with infrastructure managed as shared resources, multitenancy, chargeback based upon resource usage and more. This makes them well-positioned to make the transition to cloud and take advantage of a golden opportunity to offer differentiated services and increase revenue.

However, recent survey results suggest that users of public cloud lack confidence in the service provider industry to adequately monitor and manage their resources in the cloud. Of more than 100 IT directors and above in North America surveyed, 79 percent indicated they are running some production applications in the cloud, but only 17 percent expect to rely solely on their cloud service provider to provide performance metrics.

Service providers who are making the transition to cloud services or already offer them need to not only deploy the right processes and technologies for monitoring and management, but also be transparent with customers about the quality of service and insight they are able to deliver as a result.

The following are five key capabilities and offerings that help successful cloud service providers deliver the highest quality service, provide customers insight into usage and performance, and increase revenue. These resources ensure expectations are set and met, and that customers have the utmost confidence in the service provider’s cloud management capabilities.

1. Centralized Management

Service providers need tools that enable them to manage their traditional and cloud infrastructures as one entity. The ability to consolidate critical IT operations and dynamic cloud management functions such as performance, fault, availability, service desk, automation and event management is critical to delivering high-quality services across distributed resources. Having a consistent, correlated set of metrics across both on-premises and cloud infrastructures speeds troubleshooting. It also simplifies and optimizes management workflows and minimizes integration work to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

2. Service-Level Management with Integrated Events, Notification Workflow and Ticketing

Centralized management supports the ability to set more effective and consistent policies for events, alerts, notifications, escalation paths, IT ticketing and problem resolution workflow to ensure fast troubleshooting and consistent service delivery. It also facilitates proactive service-level management as defined by each customer’s SLAs to ensure both service provider and customer are on the same page. Service providers can also include customers in notification and escalation policies so they receive automatically designated alerts and messages that can be used for on-demand customer upgrades.

3. Customer Self-Service Portals

Service providers are offering customers their own web-based portals for views into system and application availability and performance. With multi-tenant views to see each customer’s data separately, service providers can give each customer secure views into their own data. Giving customers views into the same data they use – such as service levels and availability, performance levels, ticket queues and bandwidth usage for billing and analysis – enables service providers to be more responsive and efficient as well as quickly add revenue-generating services across virtual and cloud resources.

4. Automated Provisioning

Customer expectations of cloud service quality require a heightened level of speed and scale on top of traditional service provider operations, making automation essential. This includes the ability to provision service monitoring automatically. Successful cloud service providers are adding automation into their customer self-service portals, so that the setup of new management services can be done without requiring human intervention.

5. Bandwidth Reports and Billing Calculation

Successful cloud providers also generate standardized and customizable reports on bandwidth usage and availability per customer to ensure complete visibility into cloud deployments. This includes the use of built-in reporting tools to perform automated billing calculations according to each customer’s actual usage and billing terms.

In a world where end users expect always-on, on-demand cloud services, just deploying the infrastructure is not enough. For cloud adoption to increase, enterprise customers with critical business applications need to have faith that their service providers deliver secure, high-quality services and transparency into service levels. While not an exhaustive list, using these five cloud management technologies and service offerings – and clearly communicating the value – will help boost service levels and give customers an increased level of confidence in cloud computing. This will better enable service providers to take advantage of the massive opportunities cloud computing brings and capture more market share.

About Steve Harriman

Steve Harriman is the Senior Vice President of Marketing for ScienceLogic. For more than twenty years, Harriman has led technology marketing in startups, privately-held mid-sized ventures and publicly traded corporations. Before joining ScienceLogic, he spent five years as Senior Vice President of Marketing at NetQoS . Prior to NetQoS, Steve worked for Sterling Software and Candle Corporation. Harriman began his career in data center operations and systems programming, working in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States.

Related Links:

www.sciencelogic.com

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5 Key Service Capabilities for Cloud Providers

Service providers have been running their operations like a cloud for years, with infrastructure managed as shared resources, multitenancy, chargeback based upon resource usage and more. This makes them well-positioned to make the transition to cloud and take advantage of a golden opportunity to offer differentiated services and increase revenue.

However, recent survey results suggest that users of public cloud lack confidence in the service provider industry to adequately monitor and manage their resources in the cloud. Of more than 100 IT directors and above in North America surveyed, 79 percent indicated they are running some production applications in the cloud, but only 17 percent expect to rely solely on their cloud service provider to provide performance metrics.

Service providers who are making the transition to cloud services or already offer them need to not only deploy the right processes and technologies for monitoring and management, but also be transparent with customers about the quality of service and insight they are able to deliver as a result.

The following are five key capabilities and offerings that help successful cloud service providers deliver the highest quality service, provide customers insight into usage and performance, and increase revenue. These resources ensure expectations are set and met, and that customers have the utmost confidence in the service provider’s cloud management capabilities.

1. Centralized Management

Service providers need tools that enable them to manage their traditional and cloud infrastructures as one entity. The ability to consolidate critical IT operations and dynamic cloud management functions such as performance, fault, availability, service desk, automation and event management is critical to delivering high-quality services across distributed resources. Having a consistent, correlated set of metrics across both on-premises and cloud infrastructures speeds troubleshooting. It also simplifies and optimizes management workflows and minimizes integration work to increase efficiency and reduce costs.

2. Service-Level Management with Integrated Events, Notification Workflow and Ticketing

Centralized management supports the ability to set more effective and consistent policies for events, alerts, notifications, escalation paths, IT ticketing and problem resolution workflow to ensure fast troubleshooting and consistent service delivery. It also facilitates proactive service-level management as defined by each customer’s SLAs to ensure both service provider and customer are on the same page. Service providers can also include customers in notification and escalation policies so they receive automatically designated alerts and messages that can be used for on-demand customer upgrades.

3. Customer Self-Service Portals

Service providers are offering customers their own web-based portals for views into system and application availability and performance. With multi-tenant views to see each customer’s data separately, service providers can give each customer secure views into their own data. Giving customers views into the same data they use – such as service levels and availability, performance levels, ticket queues and bandwidth usage for billing and analysis – enables service providers to be more responsive and efficient as well as quickly add revenue-generating services across virtual and cloud resources.

4. Automated Provisioning

Customer expectations of cloud service quality require a heightened level of speed and scale on top of traditional service provider operations, making automation essential. This includes the ability to provision service monitoring automatically. Successful cloud service providers are adding automation into their customer self-service portals, so that the setup of new management services can be done without requiring human intervention.

5. Bandwidth Reports and Billing Calculation

Successful cloud providers also generate standardized and customizable reports on bandwidth usage and availability per customer to ensure complete visibility into cloud deployments. This includes the use of built-in reporting tools to perform automated billing calculations according to each customer’s actual usage and billing terms.

In a world where end users expect always-on, on-demand cloud services, just deploying the infrastructure is not enough. For cloud adoption to increase, enterprise customers with critical business applications need to have faith that their service providers deliver secure, high-quality services and transparency into service levels. While not an exhaustive list, using these five cloud management technologies and service offerings – and clearly communicating the value – will help boost service levels and give customers an increased level of confidence in cloud computing. This will better enable service providers to take advantage of the massive opportunities cloud computing brings and capture more market share.

About Steve Harriman

Steve Harriman is the Senior Vice President of Marketing for ScienceLogic. For more than twenty years, Harriman has led technology marketing in startups, privately-held mid-sized ventures and publicly traded corporations. Before joining ScienceLogic, he spent five years as Senior Vice President of Marketing at NetQoS . Prior to NetQoS, Steve worked for Sterling Software and Candle Corporation. Harriman began his career in data center operations and systems programming, working in the United Kingdom before moving to the United States.

Related Links:

www.sciencelogic.com

Hot Topics

The Latest

E-commerce is set to skyrocket with a 9% rise over the next few years ... To thrive in this competitive environment, retailers must identify digital resilience as their top priority. In a world where savvy shoppers expect 24/7 access to online deals and experiences, any unexpected downtime to digital services can lead to significant financial losses, damage to brand reputation, abandoned carts with designer shoes, and additional issues ...

Efficiency is a highly-desirable objective in business ... We're seeing this scenario play out in enterprises around the world as they continue to struggle with infrastructures and remote work models with an eye toward operational efficiencies. In contrast to that goal, a recent Broadcom survey of global IT and network professionals found widespread adoption of these strategies is making the network more complex and hampering observability, leading to uptime, performance and security issues. Let's look more closely at these challenges ...

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The 2025 Catchpoint SRE Report dives into the forces transforming the SRE landscape, exploring both the challenges and opportunities ahead. Let's break down the key findings and what they mean for SRE professionals and the businesses relying on them ...

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Catchpoint

The pressure on IT teams has never been greater. As data environments grow increasingly complex, resource shortages are emerging as a major obstacle for IT leaders striving to meet the demands of modern infrastructure management ... According to DataStrike's newly released 2025 Data Infrastructure Survey Report, more than half (54%) of IT leaders cite resource limitations as a top challenge, highlighting a growing trend toward outsourcing as a solution ...

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Gartner revealed its top strategic predictions for 2025 and beyond. Gartner's top predictions explore how generative AI (GenAI) is affecting areas where most would assume only humans can have lasting impact ...

The adoption of artificial intelligence (AI) is accelerating across the telecoms industry, with 88% of fixed broadband service providers now investigating or trialing AI automation to enhance their fixed broadband services, according to new research from Incognito Software Systems and Omdia ...

 

AWS is a cloud-based computing platform known for its reliability, scalability, and flexibility. However, as helpful as its comprehensive infrastructure is, disparate elements and numerous siloed components make it difficult for admins to visualize the cloud performance in detail. It requires meticulous monitoring techniques and deep visibility to understand cloud performance and analyze operational efficiency in detail to ensure seamless cloud operations ...

Imagine a future where software, once a complex obstacle, becomes a natural extension of daily workflow — an intuitive, seamless experience that maximizes productivity and efficiency. This future is no longer a distant vision but a reality being crafted by the transformative power of Artificial Intelligence ...

Enterprise data sprawl already challenges companies' ability to protect and back up their data. Much of this information is never fully secured, leaving organizations vulnerable. Now, as GenAI platforms emerge as yet another environment where enterprise data is consumed, transformed, and created, this fragmentation is set to intensify ...

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OpenTelemetry (OTel) has revolutionized the way we approach observability by standardizing the collection of telemetry data ... Here are five myths — and truths — to help elevate your OTel integration by harnessing the untapped power of logs ...