Organizations find numerous advantages to running workloads in the cloud, but managing the subscription billing isn’t generally one of them. As CDW works with organizations to manage their cloud services, we have learned that the work required to decipher invoices, ferret out efficiencies and otherwise manage these environments can be considerable.

That’s why we invite organizations to simplify their subscriptions — and take advantage of our complementary managed services support — by moving them from Microsoft Azure Enterprise Agreements (EAs) to Azure from CDW. The entire process takes about two weeks, start to finish, and requires no downtime.

CDW has been a Gold-level Microsoft partner for more than a decade, and last year, we were proud to become an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider. That designation reflects the exceptional engineering and technical support that we provide as a valuable partner for our customers.

I recently fielded a call from a school district that had moved some virtual machines into the cloud with Amazon Web Services. The district had an initial scope (and budget) for just 30 VMs but then quickly expanded to well over 100 cloud instances. Predictably, costs skyrocketed.

This might look like an unforced error on the part of district officials. But even large enterprises with sophisticated IT shops often run into problems when they first migrate resources to the public cloud. They may let costs run out of control due to sprawl, for example, or have trouble maintaining an environment that complies with specific industry regulations, such as HIPAA, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act or the Payment Card Industry Data Security Standard.

One simple solution to these problems is to enter a partnership with a trusted managed service provider such as CDW. Relying on deep experience developed over years of working closely with organizations in virtually all industries, an effective MSP can help businesses monitor and optimize their cloud environments for cost, performance, security and compliance.

I’ve always enjoyed mowing my lawn, dating back even to when I was a kid. And I always thought it seemed like an extravagance to pay a lawn service to do something I could do myself — I just couldn’t justify the expense. But, years ago, my thinking changed. I realized that I was missing out on precious time with my kids because I was spending half my summer weekends on yard work.

We’re seeing this same sort of shift in mindset happening more frequently among business and IT leaders regarding managed IT services. For many IT leaders, the prevailing school of thought used to be: “Why hire a partner to provide managed services for tasks we can do ourselves?” That’s changing to: “Why should we do these tasks ourselves, when they keep our staff from tackling more important projects?”

Here are four trends I see driving adoption of managed IT services.

Device as a Service — the subscription model for deploying mobile devices and endpoints — can not only simplify IT management, but also enable organizations to shift costs from a capital expense to an operating expense. But those attractive outcomes aren’t the only justifications for adopting DaaS.

Here are five additional ways organizations can obtain a positive ROI from a device subscription engagement.

Hybrid cloud is often seen as a “best of both worlds” approach, giving businesses the scalability and agility of the public cloud while also allowing them to host some workloads in their own data centers for cost, security or other reasons. But managing the complexity introduced by a hybrid cloud requires specific skills, many of which employees might lack. Consider taking the following steps to ensure that you have the expertise needed to support a hybrid cloud approach.

In my tenure as a technical architect, I have witnessed a great evolution in collaboration business reviews. What once was simply reviewing system compute, versions and tickets is now so much more.

So what should organizations prioritize when reviewing their collaboration environments?