Moving to Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a powerful step for any business. It offers amazing flexibility, scalability, and a vast array of services. But this power also brings complexity. Managing an AWS environment effectively is a full-time job that requires deep, specific expertise. This is where an AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) comes in. An MSP is a partner company that takes on the heavy lifting of managing your AWS cloud infrastructure. They act as your expert team, handling the day-to-day operations so you can focus on growing your business.

But with so many providers claiming to be the best, how do you find the right one? Choosing the wrong partner can lead to serious problems, like security vulnerabilities, runaway costs, and poor performance that frustrates your customers. Making the right choice is about finding a true partner, not just a vendor. This guide will walk you through what to look for, what questions to ask, and how to find an AWS MSP that truly fits your company’s needs.

What is an AWS Managed Service Provider?

First, let’s clear up what an AWS Managed Service Provider (MSP) actually is.

Simply put, an MSP is a third-party company that handles the daily operations of your AWS cloud environment. They are AWS consulting partners who have been officially validated by Amazon for their skills and reliability.

A tech team collaborating with an AWS Managed Service Provider to monitor and optimize the cloud environment. 
A true MSP doesn’t just fix problems when they break but also proactively manage, monitor, and optimize your entire AWS infrastructure.

This goes far beyond a simple helpdesk. A true MSP doesn’t just fix things when they break. They work proactively to manage, monitor, and optimize your entire AWS infrastructure. This often includes:

  • 24/7 monitoring and incident response
  • Managing security and compliance
  • Optimizing your cloud spending to prevent bill shock
  • Handling backups and disaster recovery
  • Automating your operations (DevOps)
  • Providing ongoing strategic advice on new AWS services

An MSP’s job is to take on the heavy lifting of cloud management. This frees up your internal IT team to stop worrying about infrastructure and focus on building applications and features that directly serve your customers.

Benefits of Partnering with an AWS Managed Services Provider

The benefits of partnering with an AWS Managed Service Provider. 
From focusing on core business to optimizing costs and accelerating time-to-market, the benefits of partnering with an AWS MSP are significant.

In the ever-growing speed of the digital world, cloud computing adds immense power to any business. AWS is a cloud provider leading the way with numerous services and tools. But efficiently managing the AWS ecosystem can be daunting and requires deep expertise. It’s here that the help of AWS-managed service providers can make all the difference.

Why partner with an AWS MSP?

Focus on Your Core Business Not Cloud Management

Your team’s time is valuable. Do you want your best engineers spending their days patching servers, monitoring logs, and troubleshooting network issues? Or would you rather have them building new products, improving customer experiences, and driving revenue? An MSP handles the complex, repetitive, and time-consuming tasks of cloud management, allowing your team to focus on strategic growth.

Gain Immediate Access to Deep Expertise

Hiring a single AWS expert is difficult and expensive. Hiring an entire team to cover security, networking, databases, and cost management 24/7 is nearly impossible for most companies. When you partner with an MSP, you get immediate access to a deep bench of certified professionals. This entire pool of specialized skills is available to you, providing a level of knowledge that would take years to build internally.

Improve Your Security and Compliance Posture

Cyber threats are always evolving. Security is a full-time job. With the global cloud security market projected to reach over $68 billion by 2025, it’s clear this is a top concern for everyone. AWS MSPs have dedicated security teams that implement best practices, monitor for vulnerabilities, and provide rapid incident response. They are also experienced in helping businesses meet strict compliance standards like GDPR, HIPAA, and PCI-DSS, which is a complicated but necessary part of operating in the cloud.

Achieve Smarter Cloud Cost Management

Cloud costs can easily spiral out of control. Without expert oversight, it’s common to pay for resources you aren’t using or to use services that are not cost-effective. An AWS MSP provides active cost management, often called FinOps. They use deep knowledge and specialized tools to identify cost-saving opportunities, optimize your resources, and prevent overspending. This proactive approach ensures you get the most value from every dollar you spend on the cloud.

Accelerate Your Time to Market

In today’s competitive landscape, speed is everything. An MSP with a strong DevOps practice can help you automate your development and deployment pipelines. With deep knowledge of AWS services and best practices, they help your teams develop, deploy, and scale applications much faster and more reliably. This agility allows you to get new features to your customers quickly and stay ahead of the competition.

Ensure Better Performance and Uptime

A qualified MSP provides 24/7/365 monitoring to ensure your systems are always running at peak performance. They can often detect and resolve issues before you or your customers even notice them.

For example, one travel provider struggled with an average of 10 days of disruption per business year, giving them about 97% availability. After partnering with an AWS MSP, they reduced that disruption time to just 52 minutes per year. This gave them a 99.99% service availability, completely transforming their reliability and customer trust.

What to Look for When Choosing Your AWS MSP

Person evaluating AWS Managed Service Provider options. 
Choosing an AWS managed service provider is a strategically informed decision

Choosing an AWS-managed service provider is like trying to find a pearl in the sea. It is a big sea, and you need to make a strategically informed decision. When you are ready to evaluate potential partners, here is what to look for.

Evaluate Their Expertise and Certifications 

This is the starting point. A provider’s official AWS designation speaks volumes. The AWS Partner Network has different tiers. You should look for an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner or even an AWS Premier Consulting Partner. These designations are not easy to earn. They require the provider to pass rigorous third-party audits, demonstrate extensive technical expertise, and provide a long list of successful customer references.

Also, ask about specific AWS Competencies. These are special validations from AWS that prove a partner has deep experience in a particular area, such as

  • Migration Competency
  • DevOps Competency
  • Security Competency
  • Data and Analytics Competency

If your main goal is to migrate a complex application, a partner with the Migration Competency is a must. Renova Cloud, for example, is an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner, demonstrating a high level of expertise and a proven history of success.

Customer References and Case Studies

A provider’s past performance is a strong indicator of its future performance. Don’t be afraid to ask for references and case studies from their customers.

These references provide real-world insight into an MSP’s capability, reliability, and levels of customer satisfaction. Ask to speak with a company that is similar to yours in size, industry, or technical challenges.

When you talk to a reference, ask specific questions:

  • How does the MSP handle communication, both for day-to-day tasks and during an emergency?
  • Have they ever helped you solve a major technical problem or outage? How did it go?
  • Do they proactively suggest ways to improve performance or save money?
  • What is the one thing you wish they did differently?

Also, look at their website for detailed case studies. Look for examples of projects that are similar to your own. If you see they have successfully helped another company in your industry modernize their applications or optimize their SAP environment on AWS, it’s a good sign they can help you too.

A Comprehensive Range of Service Offerings

Your needs will change over time. You might start by needing basic infrastructure management, but in a year, you might want to build a data analytics platform or explore Generative AI.

The MSP must be able to service all aspects of your AWS environment. Make sure what they can offer fits your current and future needs. A comprehensive service catalog often includes:

  • 24/7/365 Monitoring and Incident Response
  • Infrastructure Management (handling your EC2 instances, storage, and networks)
  • Security and Compliance Management (SecOps, vulnerability scanning, and audit support)
  • Backup and Disaster Recovery
  • Proactive Cost Optimization
  • Patch Management and Maintenance
  • DevOps and Automation Services (helping your developers build and deploy faster)
  • Database Administration
  • Application Modernization and Cloud-Native Development
  • Data Platform and Analytics Services

You want a partner that can grow with you. Choosing a provider that only handles basic monitoring might mean you have to find another partner for a more advanced project down the road. This creates unnecessary complexity.

Clear Pricing and True Cost-Effectiveness

Pricing is always a consideration, but the cheapest option is rarely the best. A low-cost provider may be cutting corners on security or support. What you should look for is long-term cost-effectiveness.

Ask for complete transparency in their pricing model. Are there hidden fees? How do they bill for their services? More importantly, ask them how they will help you save money. A great MSP should provide a return on investment by optimizing your AWS spend, which often covers the cost of their own fees. Look for a partner focused on value, not just the lowest price.

A Strong Focus on Data Privacy and Compliance

Data privacy and compliance are major features of today’s digital world. A data breach or a compliance failure can be catastrophic for your business, leading to fines and a loss of customer trust.

Ensure the MSP is deeply committed to data protection. They should be able to demonstrate how they adhere to relevant regulations such as GDPR (for Europe), HIPAA (for healthcare), or PCI-DSS (for credit card payments).

Ask them about their own certifications, such as ISO 27001, which is a global standard for information security management. They should be able to explain how they use AWS tools (like AWS Config, GuardDuty, and Security Hub) to build and maintain a compliant environment for you. 

Remember, in the cloud, security and compliance are a shared responsibility. You need a partner who can expertly manage their part.

Customer Responsiveness and Support

When your systems are down, you cannot wait 24 hours for an email response. A responsive and dependable customer support system is necessary for any successful cooperation. Seek out an MSP offering 24/7 support. 

Ask about their guaranteed response times and how they resolve issues. Do you get a dedicated account manager? Or do you just submit a ticket to a general queue? The quality of support is a huge differentiator.

The Transformative Benefits of Migrating to the AWS Cloud

Migrating to Amazon Web Services (AWS) is a strategic move beyond the limitations of on-premises hardware. This shift allows you to operate faster, scale effectively, and respond to customer needs with greater agility. It frees your teams from managing infrastructure and empowers them to focus on growth.

Significant Cost Savings

AWS eliminates large upfront hardware costs, shifting you from a capital (CapEx) to a flexible pay-as-you-go operational (OpEx) model. You pay only for the resources you use, freeing up budgets for innovation rather than maintenance.

Enhanced Security

You gain a security posture that is difficult to replicate in-house. AWS provides built-in features like data encryption, granular IAM controls, and DDoS protection, helping you meet complex compliance standards like PCI-DSS and GDPR.

Better Performance and Reliability

AWS infrastructure is built for high performance and resilience. By using multiple Availability Zones (AZs), your applications can withstand data center failures. Services like AWS Global Accelerator ensure low latency and a reliable user experience.

Greater Business Agility and Innovation

In the cloud, you can test ideas and prototype solutions in minutes, not months. AWS provides access to advanced tools, like Amazon SageMaker for machine learning, empowering teams to innovate and respond to market changes.

A Faster Time to Market

Forget waiting weeks for new servers. On AWS, you can provision entire infrastructures in minutes. This speed removes procurement delays and allows you to roll out new products and features to your customers much faster.

Instant Global Reach

AWS allows you to deploy your applications worldwide instantly. Using the AWS global network and services like Amazon CloudFront (a CDN), you can deliver content with low latency, ensuring a fast, local experience for customers everywhere.

Simplified Disaster Recovery

AWS makes disaster recovery (DR) more reliable and less complex. You can automate backups and snapshots and use Multi-AZ deployments to ensure high availability, protecting your business from costly downtime and data loss.

Powerful Data Analytics

AWS provides powerful tools like Amazon Redshift and AWS Glue to analyze massive volumes of data. This allows you to turn raw data into actionable insights for smarter, data-driven decision-making.

Flexible Scalability

The cloud offers elastic scalability. Your infrastructure can automatically scale up to handle massive traffic spikes (like on Black Friday) and then scale back down to save costs, ensuring you always have the right amount of resources.

Choose Renova Cloud For Your Next AWS Managed Service Provider

Choosing the right AWS Managed Service Provider is a major step. It’s about finding a partner you can trust to help you navigate the future.

At Renova Cloud, we are more than just a provider. We are an AWS Advanced Consulting Partner with proven, award-winning expertise in helping businesses across Southeast Asia succeed on the cloud.

We don’t just manage your infrastructure. We help you modernize it. We don’t just fix problems. We build automated DevOps platforms, like our work with a leading EV Manufacturer to accelerate their ADAS development. We don’t just talk about new technology. We implement it. We are already helping companies like FireGroup Technology and ACB Securities build cutting-edge Generative AI applications on AWS today.

From migration and cost optimization to advanced DevOps and Generative AI, we provide the end-to-end expertise you need to maximize your AWS investment.

Take the Next Step With Us 

Ready to see how a dedicated AWS partner can transform your cloud environment? Stop guessing about your cloud strategy and start building with confidence.

Contact Renova Cloud today for a free demo. We’ll show you exactly how we can help you achieve your business goals with the power of AWS.