Shivani Awasthi

Check out this insightful infographic highlighting 8 key points on why securing Microsoft 365 is critical for your business. From preventing cyber-attacks to ensuring compliance and safeguarding data, it's essential to stay proactive in securing your cloud environment. Protect your organization by understanding these crucial steps.

By 2020, a corporate “no-cloud” policy will be as rare as a “no-internet” policy is today. – Gartner

The above statement shows the extent to which the cloud boom has revolutionized the IT industry and the shift in IT needs of businesses worldwide. Imagining a day without internet in today’s era is like imagining a day without breathing! Similarly, cloud will become an integral part of our lives in a very near future.

This cloud boom has charted a new path for the service providers for generating new streams of revenue. At present, they are having an opportunity when their client base is shifting from traditional or legacy IT services to new-age cloud services providing great revenue generating opportunities.

Now this is easier said than done. Selling cloud is not a cakewalk for someone new to it. You need to have multiple things in place – service orchestration, cloud billing management, inventory and infrastructure management, technical support and helpdesk management, sales and marketing management, ordering and marketplace management, reporting and data analysis, and customer lifecycle management to sell cloud. And, most importantly you need to have automation for managing all these operations.

Let’s see how you, a service provider, can capitalize on this opportunity with Microsoft Azure, the leading cloud platform and RackNap.

RackNap’s integration with Virtuozzo API enables quick and automated provisioning and delivery of cloud servers, while Plesk automation ensures issuance and termination of Plesk licenses, in real time.

Virtuozzo Cloud Servers – an introduction

An industry leading virtualization platform for web hosters and service providers, Virtuozzo provides System Containers™, virtual machines and software-defined storage in a single solution. Virtuozzo enables enterprises and service providers to efficiently utilize the existing hardware at a very low total cost of ownership – at any phase of its lifecycle. It provides a number of benefits:

The Virtuozzo containers are highly efficient and lightweight as compared to VMs and are highly secure by design.

With hypervisor core built on open source KVM, you get high density, performance and security.

New Windows support with KVM allows service providers to run both Windows and Linux workloads with equally good stability and features.

Over 200 Virtuozzo patches are available, including memory management, high availability, backup and more.

With Virtuozzo storage, you get scalable, fault – tolerant and high performance storage.

ReadyKernel™ provides rebootless kernel updates.

“To all users of technology who are willing to take a chance, make a choice, and try a new way of doing things so that we can nurture and enjoy a happy, healthy planet.” ― Katherine Murray, Microsoft Office 365: Connect and Collaborate Virtually Anywhere, Anytime.

With the advent of multiple new technologies today, staying relevant to the customer base while being cost-effective is certainly a struggle, especially for the SMBs and the upcoming businesses. But, cloud solutions have made these two goals possible, even as the markets transition to new technologies faster than ever. The agility, scalability and cost-effectiveness that come with cloud solutions are making organizations of any size and industry move to it.

Microsoft CSPs and Office 365 – an introduction

SMBs today need to move to the cloud to drive in the business transformations that’re in the offing due to it. This has opened a world of booming opportunities for the service providers to gain economically through digitization. The Microsoft CSP program enables cloud services providers to capture these large, unexplored markets by:

Selling a wider range of Microsoft cloud offerings, with Office 365 provisioning being one of them.

Gaining ownership of the complete cloud customer lifecycle through creation of plans, setting margins, and billing, sales and support management.

Integrating, provisioning and billing Office 365 with their legacy products and providing increased value to the customers through bundled services.

Why is there a need for Office 365 Automation?

Office 365 service delivery and automation tool can help Microsoft CSP partners in:

Automating complete Office 365 customer lifecycle, comprising sales, billing, service delivery, account provisioning, management and even support. Bundling their legacy services with Microsoft Office 365 and creating customized cloud solutions for customers. Adding various relevant services to Office 365 for creating bundled solutions with automation of all the involved business processes. Enabling partners of CSPs in further reselling Office 365 services seamlessly with further Office 365 billing automation.

RackNap – Enabling Office 365 service delivery and management automation

RackNap comes readily integrated with Office 365 API that enables Microsoft CSP partners in:

Selling, provisioning and billing Office 365 within seconds.

Managing lifecycle of the Office 365 customers, including support smoothly.

Single view, accessibility and management capabilities of Office 365 licenses within RackNap client panel.

Obtaining market readiness with integrated Microsoft portal accessible from within the client panel.