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- How Infrastructure Managed Services are Evolving
- 5 Essential Capabilities for Modern Infrastructure Managed Services
- Choosing an Infrastructure Managed Service Provider
How Infrastructure Managed Services are Evolving
Selecting the right infrastructure managed service provider has never been more crucial. With subscription-based infrastructure becoming the norm and management skills in high demand, more organizations are turning to managed services for their hybrid environments. But recent studies reveal concerning trends about these relationships.
Nearly half of IT professionals worry about losing control of their systems when working with managed service providers. According to similar poll aggregations, around 40% feel they aren’t getting sufficient value from their spending, while over a third cite poor communication as a significant source of mistrust.
Understanding what capabilities to look for – and what questions to ask – can help you avoid these common pitfalls. Let’s look at five critical capabilities to expect from storage service providers in 2025 and beyond.
- Transparent infrastructure monitoring & operations
- Cost management & optimization
- Performance optimization and management
- Integration capabilities
- Risk management and compliance
Key Takeaway: The evolution of Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) and infrastructure managed services demands new approaches and capabilities from MSPs. Modern service providers should offer tools that can unify visibility, automate operations, and deliver proactive insights across hybrid environments. When they don’t, it’s up to clients to seek them out.
5 Essential Capabilities for Modern Infrastructure Managed Service Providers
Transparent Infrastructure Monitoring & Operations
What to Look For: Your infrastructure managed service provider should offer clear visibility into your entire environment.
Too often, both the client and service provider get bogged down by infighting instead of working together to improve operations.
Better visibility can prevent these problems. This means regular automated reporting that doesn’t require you to chase down information. The best providers proactively share performance trends and potential issues rather than waiting for you to ask. They should be able to demonstrate exactly what value they’re adding to your operations.
Warning Signs & Key Questions: Be wary of providers who resist sharing detailed infrastructure data or consistently delay providing requested information.
If a provider can’t quickly show you the state of your environment, that’s often a sign of poor monitoring capabilities or attempts to mask inefficiencies.
Ask potential providers:
- Can you show me examples of your monitoring dashboards?
- How will we monitor our infrastructure’s health and performance?
- What kind of regular reporting do you provide?
- How quickly can we access data about our environment?
How Visual One Intelligence Enables Transparent Monitoring: Our centralized observability platform helps providers streamline operations by automating tedious reporting tasks and surfacing actionable insights through AI analysis.
Besides improving trust, organizations with unified infrastructure visibility report 70% faster problem resolution, 66% reduction in outages, and significant improvements in resource utilization.
Visual One Intelligence unifies visibility across multi-vendor storage, compute, and cloud platforms into a single dashboard that both providers and clients can access. Its AI-driven virtual assistant automatically identifies important changes and risks, making it easy for providers to keep clients informed without creating information overload.
“Now when the customer asks us to show them something, it’s easy to prove what we’re doing.”
Cost Management & Optimization
What to Look For: Look for providers who regularly review your environment for cost-saving opportunities and provide clear breakdowns of current costs and usage patterns.
Strong infrastructure managed service providers don’t just manage your environment – they actively help optimize it. They should be able to forecast future needs and help you plan accordingly.
Warning Signs & Key Questions: Avoid providers who can’t clearly explain cost increases or seem resistant to discussions about reducing spending.
The best partners will proactively identify ways to help you save money while maintaining or improving performance.
Ask potential providers:
- How do you identify cost optimization opportunities?
- What tools do you use for cost tracking and forecasting?
- Can you provide specific examples of cost savings you’ve achieved for other clients?
- How do you handle capacity planning to prevent overprovisioning?
How Visual One Intelligence Enables Cost Management & Optimization: We enable proactive cost optimization by surfacing opportunities that often go unnoticed.
Our unified FinOps capabilities help providers identify everything from hidden storage space to cloud resource waste.
This means implementing cost analysis tools that identify optimization opportunities, workload modeling capabilities for resource planning, right-sizing recommendations to maximize efficiency, ROI tracking and forecasting, chargeback / showback capabilities for transparent billing, and capacity planning that prevents overprovisioning.
Our forecasting tools help prevent overprovisioning while ensuring sufficient capacity for growth. Some clients have saved over $1 million through recovered infrastructure assets and optimized resource allocation.
Performance Optimization & Management
What to Look For: Modern infrastructure managed service providers should prevent problems before they impact your operations.
Like in-house infrastructure practitioners, many providers find themselves caught in a reactive cycle, constantly fighting fires instead of preventing them. This approach is not only inefficient but also puts customer retention at risk.
According to industry research, proactive monitoring can prevent 40% of potential outages and improve resolution times by 30%. Look for providers who can demonstrate a clear strategy for identifying and addressing potential issues early.
Warning Signs & Key Questions: Be cautious of providers who take a purely reactive approach to performance issues or can’t clearly articulate their performance monitoring strategy.
If they can’t explain how they prevent problems, they probably don’t prevent them effectively.
Ask potential providers:
- What proactive measures do you take to prevent performance issues?
- How do you identify potential problems before they impact users?
- What’s your average response time for performance issues?
- How do you track and improve performance over time?
How Visual One Intelligence Enables Performance Optimization: By analyzing historical trends and identifying anomalies, our platform can predict capacity shortages, detect performance degradation, and identify misconfigurations before they cause issues.
Our predictive monitoring helps providers spot warning signs days or weeks before problems occur. Our clients, for example, typically prevent two unplanned outages each year – saving $1 million or more each year.
Integration Capabilities
What to Look For: Your infrastructure managed service provider should enhance your existing workflows, not disrupt them.
According to IDC, 60% of organizations will implement integrated hybrid management technologies by 2025. Look for providers who can work seamlessly with your current tools and processes while bringing new capabilities to the table.
Warning Signs & Key Questions: Be skeptical of providers who insist you completely change your workflows or abandon existing tools that work well.
Good providers adapt to your needs rather than forcing you to adapt to theirs. Ask potential providers:
- How will you integrate with our existing tools and processes?
- What platforms and technologies do you support?
- How flexible are you in adapting to our workflows?
- What integration options do you provide?
How Visual One Intelligence Enables Ecosystem Integration: We support seamless integration through built-in connections with common enterprise platforms like ServiceNow and Active Directory.
We also provides comprehensive API access for custom integrations, helping providers adapt to each client’s unique needs.
Our vendor-neutral approach means it works with virtually any infrastructure technology, from traditional storage arrays to modern cloud platforms, virtualized environments, databases, containers, and backup devices.
Risk Management & Compliance
What to Look For: Your provider should have clear security protocols and compliance procedures that they can easily explain and document. They should also be able to demonstrate how they identify and mitigate potential risks.
With data breach costs averaging $4.45 million, risk management capabilities are essential.
Warning Signs & Key Questions: Avoid providers with vague security protocols or who can’t clearly explain their compliance procedures.
If they can’t articulate their risk management strategy, that’s a major red flag. Ask potential providers:
- What specific security measures do you have in place?
- How do you handle compliance requirements?
- What’s your process for identifying and addressing potential risks?
- How do you document and communicate changes to our environment?
How Visual One Intelligence Enables Risk Management & Compliance: We strengthen providers’ risk management capabilities through automated change detection, comprehensive audit trails, and proactive security monitoring.
Our anomaly detection has helped clients spot potential security issues early, including early warning signs of ransomware intrusion. Detailed logging and reporting capabilities help ensure compliance and provide clear accountability.
Choosing an Infrastructure Managed Service Provider
Take time evaluating potential infrastructure managed service providers against these capabilities. Create a scorecard that weights each category according to your organization’s priorities. Remember – you’re not just looking for basic management services, but for a partner who can help optimize your infrastructure while maintaining appropriate visibility and control.
The best provider relationships are built on transparency, proactive communication, and shared objectives. Look for infrastructure managed service providers who demonstrate these qualities during evaluation – they often indicate how they’ll perform once selected.
Modern tools like Visual One Intelligence help both IT departments and service providers achieve these capabilities through unified observability, AI-driven insights, and automated operations.
But regardless of specific tools, understanding and delivering these essential capabilities is crucial for any organization providing or evaluating storage services.
About Visual One Intelligence®
Visual One Intelligence® is an infrastructure tool with a unique approach—guaranteeing better & faster monitoring, observability, and FinOps insights by leveraging resource-level metrics across your hybrid infrastructure.
By consolidating independent data elements into unified metrics, Visual One’s platform correlates and interprets hybrid infrastructure data to illuminate cost-saving and operations-sustaining details that otherwise stay hidden.
These insights lead to fewer tickets, less downtime, lower costs, and more efficient architectures.
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Our industry estimates are derived through:
- Aggregation of public case studies from major vendors
- Analysis of industry surveys and reports
- Synthesis of customer success metrics
- Consultation with industry experts
- Focus on median values across different organization sizes
- Conservative estimation when ranges exist
- Regular validation against new data
We aim for transparency by linking or citing verified statistics and providing insight into our methodology for estimates.
