'Our clients want to see a server in their office' - MSP on absence of cloud in South of US

Nashville-based MSP Nashville Computer claims that its customers are pushing back against moving workloads to the cloud, and are switching back to running solely on-premise infrastructure.

Managing partner of Nashville Computer, Charles Henson, told CPI that his firm "doesn't have a strong cloud computing strategy", claiming that customers in Nashville are just not interested in moving workloads to public cloud.

"We don't have a strategy in terms of a remote desktop or remote workplace structure because we've found that clients in the past in our region just don't trust the cloud," he said.

"I think part of that is because of who they are and being in the South, even though we can talk to them all day long about how it's more secure and how it beats the compliance standards. The majority of people within Nashville want to see that server in their office, and I don't know why that is. We have actually moved people to the cloud and then they said, ‘you know what? What would it take to bring that server back in-house?'"

Though Nashville Computer does have people using the cloud, Henson said it is mainly where there is a "best fit" such as a remote workforce or a team throughout the city or the country. But clients in Nashville that have an office-based team don't see the benefits of the cloud.

"Obviously all our clients use Office 365 and things of that nature, but for a true cloud environment where everybody's remoting in to the Citrix box, it's very hard for us to convince the clientele in our area that that's a good solution for them," Henson said.

Henson laid out Nashville Computer's "aggressive" growth targets for 2019. The MSP is working towards a 25 percent increase in new revenue and has set a goal of $108,000 per month in new monthly recurring revenues.

Like many of its MSP peers, security remains a key concern for the firm. The ever-present problem of customers not following what is sometimes basic security hygiene is an issue, according to Henson.

Clients are still getting caught out by clicking on malicious links, responding to suspect emails and buying iTunes cards on their desktops at work, Henson said.

"Our biggest obstacle right now is user education - teaching them that just like they get in the car every day and put on their seatbelts, they have to get into that mindset and absolutely think before they click on and respond to an email."

However, another concern is that some customers don't see the value in adding extra layers of protection such as RMM to their security stack, Henson noted, so in order to "protect clients from themselves", the firm partners with other MSPs to add extra layers to its services build to tackle such challenges.

"We can't afford to build out a $250,000 to $300,000 SOC with engineers who make $200,000 a year monitoring the devices, so it's a benefit to be able to share that resource with other MSPs. And when you look at the MSP space, it's in our best interest to partner with somebody, because as soon as we build something out, it will be outdated."

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• Topics
• Managed Service Provider (MSP)
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• Interview