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M S P ’ s G u i d e t o G e t t i n g s ta r t e d w i t h a z u r e
6. Drill Down on Key Services
Looking at Microsoft’s directory of Azure products can be a
bit overwhelming. There are dozens of services, features and
bundled suites listed at azure.microsoft.com/en-us/services,
and Microsoft released 70 new features of Azure in May during
the Build 2018 conference.
MSPs don’t need to boil the ocean by becoming an expert on all
of those services. Kassner says a few core offerings are essential for
MSPs, and capabilities around those services can provide a solid
foundation for Azure-based managed services practices. The core
offerings relevant to MSPs include:
Q Azure Resource Manager for managing app resources
Q Automation for simplifying cloud management with process
automation
Q Azure Monitor for granular, real-time monitoring data of Azure
resources
Q Network Watcher for performance monitoring and diagnostics
Q Azure Advisor for best practices recommendations
Q Azure Service Health for personalized guidance and support
for problems
Q Application Insights for monitoring Web apps and services
Q Log Analytics for collecting, searching and visualizing machine
data from on-premises and cloud systems
There’s an easy way to back into the
Azure business for MSPs, and that’s
to do something that many are doing
already: Work with a backup vendor
to provide business continuity and
disaster recovery for customers.
7. rethink migration
There’s a tendency to think about migration to the cloud as a one-
off opportunity. You take the applications or infrastructure that’s
at a customer’s site and you put it up in the cloud. Microsoft keeps
that cloud service updated on its end in perpetuity without further
migrations required. Done, next customer, please.
Kassner agrees that initial migrations to Azure are a huge opportunity
for MSPs, but says he finds that top Azure MSPs treat migration as an
ongoing business that lasts forever. “Migration is a big deal. Migration
in the cloud is constant. Migration is not just a motion of on-prem to
the cloud,” Kassner says.
That position makes sense when you consider those 70 new Azure
features Microsoft released at Build. The old model was a migration from,
say, SQL Server 2008 to SQL Server 2012, every three to five years. Now
there are radical new data services launched regularly within Azure every
few months. There might be an opportunity to rearchitect a customer’s
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Redmond Channel Partner May 2018 RCPmag.com
data for dramatically better performance from one Azure service
to a different one, and that’s a migration project.
8. Offer baselining
Whether or not a customer has migrated to Azure, MSPs
are finding opportunity in coming in to a customer site and
offering a baselining service.
“You can absolutely charge for an assessment,” Pyle says his
company has found. Champion Solutions Group is making a
business out of “getting in there, understanding what applications
are cloud-ready, what infrastructure is cloud-ready,” Pyle notes.
Beyond that initial assessment for a migration, Kassner says
a partner baselining service can provide a lot of value because
the rate of innovation is so fast.
“The baselining is very important,” Kassner says. “A cloud
MSP, a modern MSP, knows how to come in and do that for a
customer quite well. It gives the customer an ability to, No. 1,
breathe. That’s when people feel drowned. If I [as a customer]
try to do it, by the time I’m doing it, everything is moved ahead.”
As an outsider, the MSP can come in, take that snapshot and
provide an outside perspective and industry expertise. Other
benefits, according to Kassner, include helping the customer
figure out if they have the right staff or skills. “The customer
has got to keep the house running. With existing people, do I
have the right people? A cloud MSP can come in and augment
your capability and help you baseline.”
9. automate, automate, automate
MSPs who are currently succeeding in Azure tend to be highly
focused on automation, Kassner has found in researching
those partners’ practices. “Their mantra is to automate for
a living, not to operate. They teach their customer how to
automate their environment to the nth degree,” Kassner says.
That Automation service in Azure is critical for this portion
of the business. Examples of ways that partners are automating
include setting parameters where if a machine is being used at 15
percent, it should be resized, or if 50 percent of virtual machines
are using less than half of their assigned processor resources,
workloads can be automatically moved around.
Across the board, Kassner says top MSPs and partners working
with Azure follow another general mantra: “Migrate, secure,
automate and optimize.”
There is a learning curve for Azure, but Microsoft partners
are creating Azure practices that flow from their existing lines
of business and are generating additional recurring revenue
in the process. •
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner .