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These are the essential monitoring and management capabilities shaping Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) delivery in 2025 and beyond.
Shortcuts to Content Sections:
- How Storage-as-a-Service is Transforming Service Delivery
- 5 Essential Capabilities for Modern Infrastructure Managed Services
- Building the Next Generation of Storage-as-a-Service
How Storage-as-a-Service is Transforming Service Delivery
The storage-as-a-service (STaaS) and infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) markets are experiencing unprecedented growth, with most analysts expecting exponential growth through 2030.
The rise of Storage-as-a-Service represents a fundamental shift in how infrastructure managed services are delivered. As traditional storage management evolves into subscription-based services, MSP infrastructure monitoring becomes increasingly critical for service providers looking to differentiate themselves.
Products like Pure Storage Evergreen, NetApp Keystone Flex Pay, HPE GreenLake, and Dell APEX are just a few examples of how storage vendors are uniformly adding subscription-based and service-based storage options to their portfolios.
As a result, both storage providers themselves and managed service providers (MSPs) are feeling the crunch. As customers pay for more on an annual per-usage basis, their emphasis on cloud-style FinOps and cost optimization increases.
Plus, with infrastructure management skills in high demand, organizations are increasingly outsourcing more elements of their infrastructure management to other providers.
If you’re an MSP evaluating your service portfolio, or an infrastructure vendor expanding your service offerings, you’re probably thinking constantly about what customers will want most in the years to come.
So, let’s look at five essential modern storage service capabilities that infrastructure professionals and IT departments are looking for when they evaluate storage service options.
- Centralized infrastructure monitoring & operations
- Asset management and cost optimization
- Workload performance optimization
- Ecosystem integration
- Risk management and compliance
Key Takeaway: The evolution of Storage-as-a-Service (STaaS) and infrastructure managed services demands new approaches to MSP infrastructure monitoring. Modern service providers need tools that can unify visibility, automate operations, and deliver proactive insights across hybrid environments.
5 Essential Capabilities for Modern Infrastructure Managed Services
Centralized Infrastructure Monitoring & Operations
What’s the Problem? Confusion, distrust, or a lack of accountability are some of the most common obstacles to profitable customer relationships.
MSPs and vendors often lose customers simply because the MSP’s work is invisible to the customer. Without sufficient (and intentional) visibility, a client won’t know what measures a service provider is taking or what difference those measures are making.
For MSPs in particular, both the client and service provider risk getting bogged down by infighting instead of working together to improve operations.
What the Industry Says:
- 48% of IT professionals in a 2022 study expressed concerns about losing control over their systems when working with MSPs.
- 42% of IT decision-makers in a 2023 study believed they are not getting sufficient value for the money spent on MSPs.
- 34% of IT professionals in a 2022 Gartner report cited poor communication from MSPs as a significant reason for mistrust.
The demand for infrastructure managed services is growing exponentially, driving the need for more sophisticated MSP infrastructure monitoring capabilities as organizations expect providers to deliver proactive insights alongside basic storage management.
The Path Forward: MSPs and storage vendors can immediately improve customer trust by including centralized observability tools or mechanisms as part of their services.
Providers can make transparency a default component of their services by leveraging tools that:
- Unify visibility across multi-vendor storage, compute, and cloud platforms
- Automate or democratize reporting (reducing manual effort)
- Highlight optimization opportunities
- Display trends and forecast predictive analytics
Besides improving trust, organizations with unified infrastructure visibility report 70% faster problem resolution, 66% reduction in outages, and significant improvements in resource utilization.
For example, Visual One Intelligence’s centralized observability platform helps providers streamline operations by automating tedious reporting tasks and surfacing actionable insights through AI analysis.
“Now when the customer asks us to show them something, it’s easy to prove what we’re doing.”
Asset Management & Cost Optimization
What’s the Problem? Storage service providers face a critical challenge: helping customers control costs without sacrificing their own profitability. Many customers expect providers to actively optimize their storage spending. Yet many providers struggle to deliver this value while maintaining healthy margins.
The situation is complicated by the fact that most organizations lack visibility into their true storage costs. When customers can’t see or understand their spending, they often blame the provider for cost overruns – even when those overruns stem from their own inefficient usage patterns.
What the Industry Says: According to the 2024 State of FinOps Report:
- Organizations waste an average of 30% of cloud spend
- Over 50% of organizations exceeded cloud budgets in 2023
- Only 15% of organizations have mature FinOps practices
The Path Forward: Storage service providers must evolve from simple capacity providers to strategic cost optimization partners.
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.
For example, Visual One Intelligence does all of the above, functioning as a hybrid platform FinOps tool that helps manage costs across all elements of infrastructure.
Not many other tools do all of that in hybrid environments, though many are available that achieve FinOps elements within specific environments. These kinds of tools are excellent partnership opportunities for storage service providers looking to build out their client services to include cost optimization.
Workload Performance Optimization
What’s the Problem? Performance issues create a “double jeopardy” for storage service providers: they drain customer revenue through reduced response times and missed opportunities, while simultaneously increasing support costs and straining customer relationships.
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.
What the Industry Says: According to Uptime Institute’s 2023 Global Data Center Survey:
- 80% of data center outages are preventable
- 60% of outages result in losses exceeding $100,000
- 20% of outages cost over $1 million
The Path Forward: Providers must shift from reactive to proactive performance management.
Aggregated industry research suggests that proactive monitoring can prevent 40% of potential outages and improve mean time to resolution by 30%.
Our clients, for example, typically prevent two unplanned outages each year – saving $1 million or more each year.
By replacing post-downtime alerts and troubleshooting with pre-downtime warnings and recommendations, proactive monitoring works in tandem with capabilities like advanced capacity planning and forecasting, performance analytics and trending, clear cost implications of workload changes, automated anomaly detection, root cause analysis capabilities, and SLA monitoring and reporting.
Ecosystem Integration
What’s the Problem? As infrastructure environments become more complex, customers expect their storage services to integrate seamlessly with their broader IT ecosystem. Providers who can’t deliver this integration force customers to maintain multiple separate tools and workflows, creating friction that often leads to customer dissatisfaction.
What the Industry Says: According to IDC’s FutureScape: Worldwide Cloud 2024 Predictions:
- By 2025, 60% of organizations will implement integrated hybrid management technologies
- 70% will standardize on cloud-centric tools
- Over half will leverage automated operations
The Path Forward: Success requires implementing comprehensive integration capabilities.
A recent survey by Enterprise Strategy Group found that organizations with well-integrated tools report 77% faster mean time to resolution for incidents, 71% reduction in unplanned downtime, and 2.3x better resource utilization.
At Visual One, for example, we’ve dramatically expanded from our roots as a storage resource management (SRM) tool. In addition to consolidating multi-vendor storage, cloud, and compute environments on one dashboard, we also now include:
- ServiceNow integration for streamlined workflows
- Active Directory integration for access management
- Backup and database visibility
- Container observability spanning Kubernetes, Docker, OpenShift, and more
- API accessibility for custom integrations
Risk Management & Compliance
What’s the Problem? Storage service providers face mounting pressure to protect customer data while maintaining compliance with evolving regulations. A single security incident or compliance violation can destroy customer trust and result in substantial penalties.
Yet many providers struggle to maintain comprehensive risk visibility across their service portfolio, especially as infrastructure environments become more distributed and complex.
What the Industry Says: Recent studies show:
- Average cost of a data breach reached $4.45 million in 2023.
- 83% of organizations experienced more than one data breach.
- Regulatory fines can reach up to 4% of global revenue.
The Path Forward: Modern storage service providers must implement comprehensive risk management capabilities.
Proactive risk identification, change management logs, compliance reporting, performance impact analysis, audit trails, and access control monitoring are examples of essential risk management abilities for infrastructure service providers.
Building the Next Generation of Storage-as-a-Service
As Storage-as-a-Service continues transforming infrastructure delivery models, MSPs must evolve their monitoring and management capabilities to meet escalating customer expectations. Success in infrastructure managed services increasingly depends on providing these five capabilities through a unified, proactive approach to service delivery.
Modern tools like Visual One Intelligence help 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.
