Accounting firms are increasingly transitioning to managed cloud hosting, owing much to evolving client expectations and the demand for hybrid work arrangements.
However, despite the healthy amount of research and analysis while selecting and onboarding the right managed hosting partner, few firms focus on regularly tracking their performance while using the service. This tends to result in unpredictable costs and unsatisfactory service levels.
As such, accounting firms need to track some specific aspects of a provider to evaluate whether they made the right decision. This article covers several key factors firms should consider more closely when looking at performance.
First off, once you have transitioned to managed cloud hosting services, it is essential to monitor resource utilization to minimize costs and improve operational efficiency.
Cloud providers offer automated scaling, in which resources are allocated according to current application requirements. Depending on the provider and pricing model, firms may pay a fixed monthly fee per user or application, or they may be billed according to the resources consumed.
Where usage-based pricing applies, monitoring resource utilization can help control costs and prevent unexpected charges. Therefore, you must evaluate the approximate costs before every billing cycle and track resource utilization, such as CPU usage, number of users, RAM, storage, and network bandwidth, to analyze if you are on track.
Regularly tracking cloud hosting costs and performing a trend analysis to identify whether it is saving you more than on-premises operations is also essential.
Opting for managed hosting services is meant to minimize your in-house IT expenses. However, failing to track costs and return on investment of cloud hosting can lead to overheads and hidden charges that may exceed in-house costs.
Moreover, you must analyze the cost of each service that incurs additional costs and whether it is feasible for the long term. For instance, some managed hosting providers incur additional costs for premium support or data backup.
Check whether these services deliver the expected ROI, or whether on-premises IT is a better alternative. Track key performance indicators, such as cloud efficiency ratio, which help you evaluate cloud costs as a factor of revenue generated. You should also check for hidden charges, such as data egress fees and transaction charges, that can impact ROI.
Data security also remains the primary concern for an accounting firm as they work with confidential client information. Consequently, when shortlisting managed hosting providers, firms focus on analyzing the providers’ security posture, protocols, and infrastructure. However, after onboarding, most firms ignore tracking whether the cloud provider is ensuring data security.
Therefore, even after you have opted for a provider, you must track essential KPIs, such as:
- Mean time to patch: Analyzes whether the provider regularly applies security patches to mitigate vulnerabilities.
- Security incidents per year or customer: Evaluates whether the number of security incidents, such as data breaches or ransomware, is decreasing per year or as the number of users increases. For instance, if data breach incidents have increased by 25% from last year, but user count has increased by 75%, you can assess whether the provider’s security posture is robust.
- Compliance violations: Tracks the rate of non-compliance events over time or the number of users.
The competency of a managed cloud hosting provider is defined by the service levels they can guarantee. An incompetent customer support system can lead to significant downtime and security vulnerabilities. I advise tracking key metrics, such as mean time to detect (MTTD), mean time to resolution (MTTR), and average response time to evaluate a provider’s service levels.
MTTD measures how quickly an issue is detected, while MTTR measures the average time required to resolve the issue and restore normal service. However, you must ensure that these metrics are not only communicated verbally but also included in the SLA, making the provider legally bound.
Whichever managed hosting provider you choose, it is the accountants who work on the applications and data. Consequently, they are the ones who can give you the clearest picture of whether the cloud provider is living up to the guaranteed standards.
Hence, it is imperative to get regular feedback from employees on various aspects such as performance. You can implement an instant feedback system, in which accountants can register feedback as soon as they experience an issue.
Collecting frequent feedback gives you clear visibility into the provider’s operations, helping you track ROI, productivity, and business efficiency. You can then make informed decisions on transitioning to a better alternative.
Uptime also cannot be ignored as a KPI to track when working with a managed hosting provider, as even a minor downtime during peak periods like tax season can lead to significant reputational damage. Although most providers guarantee a minimum downtime in their service-level agreement, it is critical to track whether they are living up to the agreement.
Ultimately, you must ensure that the provider’s backup solutions are efficient to prevent data loss during ransomware and phishing attacks. You must track KPIs, such as recovery point objective (RPO), recovery time objective (RTO), backup completion time, and recovery test success rate, to ensure accurate backups.
These KPIs that I have mapped out not only help validate your return on investment but also enable proactive improvements that enhance efficiency, strengthen security, and ensure a reliable experience for both employees and clients. However, you must align the KPIs with your business goals and avoid tracking too many indicators, which will only complicate things.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Dr. Sangeeta Chhabra, co-founder and executive director of Ace Cloud Hosting, is a leader and innovative entrepreneur with more than 20 years of experience in the IT sector. She has positioned the company as a leading global provider of IT and managed cloud services, celebrated for its QuickBooks hosting tailored for the accounting sector, managed security services, Desktop as a Service, and public cloud offerings for SMBs and enterprises. Under her leadership, Ace Cloud Hosting was honored as the Best Outsourced Technology Provider at the CPA Practice Advisor Readers’ Choice Awards 2023, among other accolades. Beyond her professional successes, Dr. Chhabra is a passionate advocate for women’s empowerment and is committed to fostering an inclusive environment at Ace Cloud Hosting.
Photo credit: fullvector/Freepik
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