When you grab a gallon of milk at the grocery store, the price is obvious, and you pay the same as everyone else who picks up that particular product.
However, more complex solutions and services don’t work that way. If you take your car to the shop because it’s making a mysterious sound, you can’t expect the mechanic to tell you how much you’re going to owe without investigating the issue first. The cost depends on the specific situation. You and other customers will also owe varying amounts since you drive different cars with unique parts and problems.
Working with a managed service provider (MSP) to carry out cloud migration is more like taking your car to the mechanic than buying milk. Because each business has individual needs, goals and pain points, we can’t tell you exactly how much moving to the cloud will cost you without conducting an assessment first. Other providers will gladly name a number without evaluating your IT environment, but the deals they offer aren’t as great as they seem.
The True Cost of One-Size-Fits-All Pricing for Cloud Migration
If you’re shopping around for an MSP to migrate your phone system, servers, or other aspects of your infrastructure to the cloud, you might be hesitant to partner with a provider that can’t tell you the price of the project right away. For instance, a potential client decided not to work with us because they didn’t want to undergo an assessment to determine how much it would cost to move their server environment.
Some providers will offer pricing without considering the details of your situation first, and you might be tempted to sign a contract with one of those MSPs. However, the odds are good that you’ll regret giving in to the allure of those one-size-fits-all deals.
Businesses that work with those types of IT providers often end up on our doorstep asking us to clean up the mess after the other MSP delivered an incomplete, slipshod solution. Just like your car, your IT isn’t something you want to cheap out on since you’ll likely find yourself dealing with a disaster down the road.
For example, one of our clients came to us after their previous provider mis-designed their whole network. Their application performance was abysmal, and they struggled with frequent outages. They’re not the only company that’s turned to us due to that sort of snafu.
In 2020, 40 percent of enterprise organizations reported that the cost of just one hour of downtime ranged from $1 million to more than $5 million, according to Information Technology Intelligence Consulting’s 11th annual Hourly Cost of Downtime Survey. Attractive initial prices can ultimately end up offset by outages and lost productivity if the product isn’t reliable.
Cybersecurity is another major factor to consider. If your MSP doesn’t set up your cloud solution correctly, you might end up dealing with an expensive and reputation-wrecking data breach. Cloud misconfigurations – which occur when whoever sets the product up doesn’t select the proper settings – are common and costly. In 2018 and 2019 combined, data breaches caused by misconfigurations cost companies worldwide a total of nearly $5 trillion, according to the 2020 Cloud Misconfigurations Report from DivvyCloud.
Given the potential price of getting it wrong, do you really want to select an MSP that throws out a price without first considering the complexities of your network and infrastructure?
Why It’s Worth It to Invest Without Knowing the Price Up Front
If you come to us seeking assistance with cloud migration, we won’t be able to tell you how much it’s going to cost you right away. However, we will be able to tell you that we’ll deliver a comprehensive and high-quality solution that meets all your security, compliance and performance needs.
Our process involves conducting a network assessment/consulting engagement first. After that, we’ll onboard you as a managed IT client, and our consultants will spend a few months mapping out the migration process and designing your solution based on factors like these:
- Business-critical applications and app performance needs
- We’ll evaluate the cost and quality of each cloud option. While some apps have a public cloud offering, many don’t. In those cases, you can go with a private cloud solution or hyperscalers such as Azure, AWS or Google Cloud).
- Business-critical applications and app performance needs
- Your digital transformation strategy and plans
- Your workforce
- Remote and mobile workers
- How they access applications
- Your workforce
- Bandwidth requirements
- Compliance needs (e.g., HIPAA)
- Cybersecurity needs
Overall, cloud migration is a complicated process, and it takes plenty of time and effort to do it correctly. Partnering with an MSP that understands that and knows pricing can vary significantly depending on your unique situation can make the difference between a productive future and one in which your business suffers frequent downtime, data breaches and other issues.
If you have any questions or comments, don’t hesitate to contact us by calling 877-599-3999 or emailing sales@stratospherenetworks.com.
