Azure Partner Services Offering
Is your IT team looking for effective ways to manage their cloud environment?
Most Azure MSPs offer six discrete areas of functional support, as outlined below. Their managed services offerings are developed by combining these functions in the form of service packages. Within each function, there is a spectrum of services that MSPs can provide, depending on their customer needs and their capabilities. Here we will discuss each of these functions in detail through the lens of some potential customer questions.
How do I get more speed, agility and performance for my it assets?
Most Azure MSPs offer six discrete areas of functional support, as outlined below. Their managed services offerings are developed by combining these functions in the form of service packages. Within each function, there is a spectrum of services that MSPs can provide, depending on their customer needs and their capabilities. Here we will discuss each of these functions in detail through the lens of some potential customer questions.
Will you migrate my workloads to azure? Will you take care of architecture changes in order to meet the reliability, scalability, and availability requirements?
The deployment offering of an MSP practice means leaving behind the world of plans and tests and venturing into the realm of taking action. While everything looks good on paper, it’s the successful zero-downtime migration of a production application-with live users-that forms the trust test, ultimately determining whether the migration is labelled a success or a failure. This is the point in the cloud journey where data will be migrated and apps will be decommissioned, re-platformed, remediated or consolidated-all while providing a seamless experience for the customer.
There is not a one-size-fits-all approach to migrating to the cloud. However, some general approaches are tested and proven.
Assessments
In this assessment phase, use a mix of interviews and technology to identify the current environment. but do not limit the assessment to just versions of software deployed, use this as an opportunity to understand the customer’s business in-depth. That means working with project managers, IT professionals, end-users, and more to gain valuable insight and potential opportunities.
One of the outputs of the assessment phase is a detailed understanding of costs-existing application running costs, a forecast of cloud running costs post-migration, and the cost of migration itself. These costings, together with the other benefits of migration, are essential for making a go/no-go decision on the migration project. Typically, customers will therefore procure the migration assessment as a stand-alone work item, before deciding whether to proceed with the application migration itself.
Migration & modernization
This phase is where technical experts start migrating the first workloads into Azure, identified from the assessment phase of modernizing the application to take advantage of native cloud services. This involves laying the foundation of setting up the network, ensuring identity and security, and creating the resources in Azure. Additional considerations such as user acceptance testing and implementing a failback plan will be detailed in the Cloud Migration and Modernization chapter.
Optimize & manage
The optimize and manage phase is where the managed services team takes over, and the focus is on monitoring, preventative maintenance, and optimization. After the workloads or applications are stabilized there will be a substantial amount of data to review that can open up opportunities for optimization.
Read More about our Azure Migration services
Azure Cloud Migration
Will you back up all my data and provide disaster recovery to my mission critical applications in case of outages?
Now that the customer’s data is in cloud, your real responsibilities begin - ongoing operations management. As part of this offering, you provide the base management services your customers are looking for: automation and orchestration, patching updates, configuration management, backup and disaster recovery, and identity management.
Customers expect all of these tasks to be ‘managed’ by their partner.
How can I actually monitor all of my hosted and internal it assets?
Most mid-market and enterprise organizations simply do not have the time, resources, or dedicated staff required to monitor every aspect of IT, and this is where MSPs add the most value. While Azure offers many monitoring, capabilities built within the platform – there is still a place for partners who (a) provide additional, deeper monitoring tooling, (b) triage the false positives from the real alerts and (c) proactively act upon the alerts before any measurable loss in performance.
How much is it going to cost?
This is the bottom-line question you will get as an MSP. Helping customers manage their cloud spend and make sense of their Azure bill is a critical service. If you can efficiently attribute your customer's spend to different projects, departments, teams, applications and cost centers you can demonstrate the true monetary value of your practice.
Does your business have the tools and expertise to effectively get ahead of security threats?
The current digital security landscape for businesses can accurately be described in one word: complicated. More numerous and advanced threats, more nebulous and complex compliance requirements, more difficult and intricate infrastructure to secure. Simply put: keeping data, workloads, and users secure is more than a full time job and organizations are having trouble keeping up. That's where managed services comes into save the day.
We can help in all 6 areas, if we find that an area is best suitable to one of our partners then we would in engage. In all case folio1 teams is always a part of our customer project life cycle.
For more information please contact our team.
Microsoft Azure Managed Services, Consulting Services & licensing.
Find out more call us on +61 3 9428 922 or download our business credentials document & discover how our Microsoft Azure Services can impact your business.
Click Here, to Schedule a Free Consultation Or fill in the form below for a callback.
Azure Services