5 Places to Look for Your First Cloud Workspace Customer

In previous blog posts, we’ve discussed why service providers need to consider implementing a Cloud Workspace strategy, but now let’s look at why your clients should consider a Cloud Workspace offering. During our partner strategy calls we are inevitably asked, “Who are the best candidates for the Cloud Workspace?” While there is no single answer, and we have clients spanning nearly every size range and vertical market, if you are just getting started there are a few places to look for the low-hanging fruit.

Good candidates for the Cloud Workspace fall into a handful of buckets:

• 5-15 users: This group is typically a service provider’s biggest headache and lowest margin client base. However, a hosted solution provides a blueprint for standardization that allows organizations to reduce the number and severity of trouble tickets, making them instantly more profitable.
• Remote or mobile workforce: This group has historically relied on VPNs or uploading data at the end of the day/week. In this scenario, it is not only difficult to manage and secure data on end-user devices, but also incredibly inefficient for the client. A hosted solution, on the other hand, centralizes all of their IT in a secure, reliable and high performance data center. It also includes all performance monitoring, security, and backups, while also supporting BYOD programs.
• High server/user ratio: Clients with legacy client/server applications are great candidates for Cloud Workspaces because it reduces TCO when compared to an on-premises solution. In a hosted model, resources are allocated based on utilization, and managed by performance monitoring and capacity planning systems. Businesses are also able to scale operations up or down on-demand without having to make large CapEx investments on infrastructure to support changing applications and user workloads. In addition, service providers can increase their overall business value and reduce CHURN by adding new recurring cloud revenue streams and capturing project revenue in a subscription model.
• Professional service organizations: Lawyers, accounts and wealth management businesses are excellent candidates for a hosted workspace solution for all of the reasons listed above, as well as the private and privileged information that they handle. Lawyers, for instance, need access to data when they are onsite with customers, taking a deposition or at a courthouse. The data needs to be secure, encrypted, backed up and retained and most law firms don’t have the technical expertise to ensure security and compliance in these distributed, mobile environments. In these firms, application downtime is not an option, and dedicated VPN connections can be both unreliable and difficult to manage. With a Cloud Workspace solution, professionals can log into their critical applications from internet-connected devices anywhere. In addition, software for these verticals are typically resource-intensive, and there are a limited number of lightweight SaaS applications available to handle the required workloads. To maintain those legacy applications in-house requires significant investment in infrastructure, virtualization technologies, as well as the (expensive) IT expertise to support the environment.
• Construction, property management and local municipalities: More often than not, these organizations have remote workers in multiple locations that need access to applications and centralized data. Site-to-site communication and collaboration are increasingly important, but can become too complex and expensive to implement and manage on-premises, or unreliable when using dedicated VPNs.

While a Cloud Workspace solution might not work for every customer, there are a wide variety of use cases where it does, particularly in the SMB market. For those use cases, we’ve found that the total cost of ownership of an on-premises solution versus a Cloud Workspace is typically 30-40% higher. With an on-boarding, automation and orchestration platform like itopia’s Cielo, our service provider partners can easily add a Cloud Workspace solution to their offerings for the customers that could benefit from it most.

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