Being a Cloud Service Provider (CSP) definitely has its challenges, and it is without a doubt harder than many people often think. As a CSP, you know that your business goes beyond just being an intermediary between the cloud provider and the end customer.
In order to become a successful CSP, you need to be able to become the partner that resellers need and add value to their own business. More often than not, you have CSPs that do not provide the best possible service and are not able to stand out from their competitors. But how do you get to be a successful CSP? Here are 4 tips that we found to be crucial to increasing your success rate as a CSP.
1: Complete Customer Self-Service
One of the beauties of offering IT cloud computing solutions, is the sheer amount of freedom and flexibility you can have. You can add or remove solutions effortlessly and develop your infrastructure to be fitting to your current needs. Sounds easy, right?
Tailoring a business for your customer is a step in the right direction, but what your customer does not know what they need or can't properly communicate it? That is when a good CSP provisioning platform starts to become useful.
Manual tasks are unfortunately still common for a lot of CSPs, and in many cases they simply do things the way they have been doing it for the past years, not knowing that there are alternatives. But as we know, and cover in one of our previous blog posts, the requirement for manual intervention slows down processes.
For a CSP, deployment can be as easy or as difficult as they want to make it. By providing your customers with a self-service, automated, provisioning platform, they will be able to navigate and manage their own subscriptions. This will allow them to become more agile, and consequently more efficient and successful - all of which reflects on you.
2: Fast and Reliable Billing
Successful CSPs may also provide automated invoicing, which is closely tied to automated provisioning. The price model remains one of the primary selling aspects of cloud computing since it eliminates the significant capital expense
Flexible consumption, on the other hand, might result in unexpected bills. It is no secret that keeping track of cloud usage and charging for it is challenging, especially when many cloud providers are involved. Because organizations seldom select cloud providers that are a technological match, this is the case.
As a result, successful CSPs have automatic billing incorporated into their platforms. They make sure that clients are aware of how much they are spending and for what they are spending. This allows them to make spontaneous judgments while still providing them with cost certainty.
3: No Micromanagement!
The truth of the matter, more often than not, is that businesses almost always desire to maintain their own IT systems and apps on-premises. These resources, in the best-case scenario, are seamlessly connected with cloud services. A CSP's job is to make that integration as painless as possible so that businesses may have a seamless experience.
As a result, optimal CSPs can blend in and navigate almost undetected. They merely provide the services in the manner in which they best suit the client's needs. Their technology also allows for data synchronization and APIs that make it as easy as possible to link cloud services to apps.
4: Leave Room for your Customer’s Branding
Your resellers do not want to feel as if they are an extension of your brand, but rather their own. That is why it is important to give them the space and tools necessary to continue growing their business and their brand. What distinguishes a good from a great CSP is the way you allow for your customers to grow.
All these functionalities are available in the CloudCockpit platform for Microsoft Cloud service CSPs. Any Cloud Service Provider may prosper thanks to complete control, invoicing automation, and easy connection with current IT. The tools are in place for you to start your own cloud business.