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?

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: