You may be aware of the Microsoft licensing changes announced back in October 2022, courtesy of the complaints lodged by European cloud providers in early 2022. As a result, service providers have already started rethinking their hosting model and exploring new opportunities.
Like everything else, though, the story is no different on this topic either – CHANGE is the only constant! Yes, you heard it right – we could be seeing more changes in the Microsoft licensing world – stay tuned for more on this!
Hybrid Licensing: Benefits and Challenges Ahead
For end customers, the hybrid licensing and hybrid cloud models certainly give more flexibility, security, and control. If you are a service provider though, it’s not all good news, unfortunately, given you still own/co-own the onus of compliance in your IaaS environment. If you thought managing Microsoft SPLA licensing in your hosting platform was difficult now given the unique licensing rules and the month-to-month tracking of users, it’s about to get even more tricky.
Your clients are now allowed to bring CSP licenses (e.g., M365 E3) and eligible volume licenses to your SPLA environment – not just for the applications but even for the base OS. Sooner or later, typical hosting platforms will be expected to have licenses from licensing programs such as SPLA, CSP Subscription, M365, Open, Enterprise Agreement, etc.
And guess what, no checks or approvals are required from Microsoft any longer (Hint: this means more checks & controls by the service provider – yes, that’s you!)
Service Provider Challenges: Future-Readiness and Profitability
For MSPs/Hosters, these changes are more than a question of licensing and compliance. It is about being a trusted advisor to your clients, well into the future.
To be future-ready, you’ll need adequate insights about your customers environments to drive proactive and productive discussions with them. You’ll also need data that can help you stay on top of operations, compliance, and financial profitability. And you’ll need to be certain of which cloud is better for your customer workloads – yours or a public cloud.
We all know the disadvantages of “all eggs in one basket” – and that applies to both worlds. If you have invested heavily into your private/hosting platform, it’s not in your best interest to drive all your customers out of it. However, it might also not be the best idea to keep all customers constrained to your cloud especially if some of them could benefit from the power and scale of a public cloud.
As future-ready service providers, you need to know both what is best for your customer and whether it is profitable for you as an MSP.
Making educated decisions (and controlling your operational costs as the provider) is easier when you have the right information.
Why MSPs and Hosters Need an Intelligent FinOps Platform?
Data is king and for the MSPs and Hosters, their customers’ environments are a gold mine for valuable insights. This can then be used to support business-critical decisions, improve predictability, and give your customers comprehensive and confident recommendations about their cloud usage. An intelligent FinOps platform can help MSPs /Hosters get that critical information by unlocking data from their customers’ hybrid cloud environments.
So, the real question is – what’s the cost of not doing anything?
How Can We Help?
rhipe is committed to enabling our service provider community to be future-ready. We have resources and tools to support our hosting partners to reduce costs, mitigate compliance and business risks as well as identify new revenue opportunities. We have also designed programs and incentives for hosting partners to help build a cloud pipeline and accelerate your hybrid cloud journey, alongside the ability to diversify your services portfolio.
We’ve covered this topic in depth with one of our partners, RBC Group. Listen to the full interview to find out how they optimised SPLA costs and improved reporting.
Listen Now! How RBC Group Optimised SPLA Costs & Improved Reporting!
