Meet the Azure Experts
As Microsoft Azure Expert MSP we can provide you with deep knowledge and expertise in Microsoft Azure. Contact our team today for support.
Meet the teamAs of October 1st 2016, many changes have gone into effect regarding Microsoft Azure. There are several ways to purchase Azure, and Microsoft has taken steps to create price parity between the different licensing programs (with a couple of exceptions), which makes it more important than ever to take a step back and look at your Azure investment to ensure you are positioned to maximize the benefits and savings available. These changes will also make it easier, and more dangerous to your bottom line, to utilize Azure without properly analyzing your configuration. The great (and not so great) thing about Azure is that it is easy to start using; however, you can waste money in configurations that are not optimized.
So let’s start with the changes. What is important to know? As of October 1st, Microsoft has aligned previously varying Azure pricing levels across its Pay-As-You-Go portal and all the traditional volume licensing programs through which a customer purchases Azure. This is an attempt to make it easier to procure Azure because you don’t have to compare pricing across programs to determine the lowest rates associated with consumption. The pricing parity is supposed to allow customers to focus on the actual Azure configuration, rather than the pricing. Some important details about the changes include:
We consulted our Azure experts to gain a better understanding of what challenges exist for organizations that are in the early stages of Azure adoption, or those looking to see if Azure is the right fit for them.
Typically, the largest concern customers face when utilizing Azure’s portfolio of over 200 services is whether or not they are using the correct service and doing so in accordance with Microsoft best practices. Anyone is able to spin up a virtual machine or cloud service but making sure that service remains available, doesn’t incur data loss, and makes the most of each euro or dollar spent is the larger challenge.
Support is by far the number one need companies face. Customers want a single place to call not only when there are issues with their environment, but even when they are in the planning and architectural phases to be sure that they are doing things correctly. The ability to work through the various considerations and challenges is paramount to their successful adoption of cloud services.
There are many considerations to take into account when determining the Azure services to use, how to use them, and how to configure them. Some of the common ones are as follows.
Virtual Networks: What kinds of firewalls does the customer use and what limitations does that impose on our connectivity?
Virtual Machines: What considerations do we need to take into account for availability and resiliency and how does that impact our costs?
SQL Server: When it comes to VMs, there are multiple technologies to consider when thinking about availability, replication, and disaster recovery. Selecting a technology can have implications on both the performance of the application, RTOs and RPOs, as well as costs of licensing that SQL instance. In addition, there are considerations on what type of Azure service to use (IaaS or PaaS), which will change how easily these things are accomplished and what the associated costs are.
Monitoring and Analytics: Customers can deploy a workload or application relatively easily on Azure services, but commonly need tools to monitor those applications – whether its performance, availability, or logging errors. Customers need an easy way to troubleshoot issues and it isn’t always obvious how to accomplish this, but there are services within the Azure platform specifically designed for this purpose such as Visual Studio Application Insights.
Service Selection: Many of the factors listed above along with something as simple as choosing an A Series VM vs a D Series VM can have a big impact on the overall cost, performance, and, at the end of the day, customer experience when using the Azure platform so having an advisory resource to lean on for these types of questions is important to the customer’s success both technically speaking and monetarily.
How does SoftwareONE offer help companies tackle some of the considerations and challenges mentioned in the article?
First and foremost, SoftwareONE has the ability to assess a customer environment. This gives customers insight into what is currently running, on what resources, and what the utilization of those resources is. This helps architect a highly utilized and cost effective solution within Azure and make recommendations on which Azure services to utilize.
Our experts take into account Microsoft best practices and their knowledge of the Azure platform to build a solution that is cost-efficient and meets customer SLA, uptime, and performance requirements.
In addition to this, both the Microsoft team and the SoftwareONE engineering and architect team will work with the customer on specific initiatives or projects in the form of cloud consults. Cloud consults are typically around a ten day engagement which we can work with the company’s team on architecture, deployment, and post deployment activities to make sure their project goes smoothly.
Lastly is ongoing support in which SoftwareONE can assist through a ticket system with any issues that may arise. In addition to on-demand support, we proactively provide monthly IT administrator webinars to go over new Azure technologies and best practices to stay up to date on an ever changing cloud landscape.
As Microsoft Azure Expert MSP we can provide you with deep knowledge and expertise in Microsoft Azure. Contact our team today for support.
Meet the team