The lifeblood of a successful Managed Service Provider (MSP) practice is automation. To deliver automation, an MSP has to arrive at points of standardization across key processes and jobs. Why?

A successful MSP can have an incredible volume of tasks, large and small, across various functional areas to complete every day, including ticket management, services scheduling and pipeline management. If not managed properly, these tasks become gaping holes that lead profit out of the business because of inefficiency. But fear not, there are plenty of tools out there to help an MSP solve for these inefficiencies via standardization around industry best practices and automation platforms.

Have you felt overwhelmed at the thought of migrating your existing on-premise workloads to the cloud? Have you felt anxious and fearful of the consequences if things go wrong during the migration process, or if your business-critical application has elongated downtimes? Although there is no magic pill that can alleviate those concerns, much of the risk can be minimized by detailed planning and accounting for the various parts that can lead the migration project to fruition. Let us look at what some of these components are.

Stop me if you’ve heard this one:

A mother and daughter were preparing a chicken dinner together. The mother cut the legs off of the chicken before roasting it and when the daughter asked why, the mother replies, “That’s the way my mother always did it.”

Before we answer the question of where to start, let’s consider why an end user should opt for cloud first: