Are You Getting the Most Out of Your Managed Azure Hosting Investment?

Another key difference between traditional IT and the cloud is that Azure hosting isn’t just a case of deploying your environment and leaving it to run by itself.

An IT infrastructure hosted in the cloud requires continual monitoring, management, and optimisation if it’s expected to continue performing as you need it to.

Of course, you want to be able to focus entirely on your own priorities, whether that’s running your business or managing your team. It’s highly unlikely you have the time or the resources to be constantly worrying about whether your IT systems are running properly.

Unfortunately, unless you’ve taken a strategic approach to finding the right hosting services, that’s one of the challenges you’ll eventually end up facing.

If you’ve read this far, your organisation probably already has some processes, workflows, or applications hosted in the Azure cloud.

If so, do any of the following scenarios sound familiar?

• You’re working with an Azure hosting partner already, but you’re unhappy with the service provided, and want to move cloud partners?
• You had a consultant deploy your cloud for you without a strategy in place, and you now need to plan for the long-term
• Your current hosting provider isn’t giving you any additional support, and you need more help managing and maintaining your cloud environment
• You have an in-house team supporting your cloud, but are facing challenges due to a skills gap
• You’re receiving erratic costs and surprise charges.

If any of these issues are resonating with you, the time has come for you to explore different options with a cloud management solution or managed Azure hosting and find a better solution.

There are several options to choose from when it comes to Azure hosting. The important thing is to determine which will be the most suitable choice for your organisation’s specific situation.

It’s also worth mentioning here that the most suitable choice right now may not be in a year, so remain open-minded. We’ll explain this in more detail later in the article.

Whether you’re just running a few applications in the cloud and need someone to look after your environment, or are looking to facilitate the hosting of an entire cloud-based IT infrastructure, you need to find a solution that best meets your unique requirements.

The most common options include:

1 – In-house managment of your Azure hosting

If you decide to purchase your Azure hosting directly with Microsoft as your cloud provider, you’ll be responsible for all the set-up, configuration, and management of your own virtual IT environment.

This will require investment to ensure your team has the necessary cloud-specific skills and experience to keep your cloud running without any issues. This will also take up a significant amount of time and resources for the people responsible.

Unfortunately, this isn’t easy. As mentioned earlier, managing a cloud estate is entirely different to managing an on-premise IT infrastructure. Perhaps you might have done this to begin with, and now need a partner to take over the cloud management or cloud hosting for you.

2 – Work with an Azure hosting partner

As an alternative to the above option, you can find a partner to host and deploy your workload in the cloud for you. In some cases, this will ideally come with some additional support and consultancy from the partner, but not always.

This is usually the most common approach businesses take, especially when cloud adoption has come without a holistic strategy in place.

However, working with a consultant or Azure hosting partner can be extremely costly, or it can be highly cost-effective when you’re able to find the right one. If you’re relying on multiple partners for different aspects of your cloud environment, and aren’t receiving any additional services from your hosting partner, you could end up significantly over-spending.

When evaluating your options, or deciding which approach to take with Azure hosting, it’s important to be aware of some recent developments in the cloud market as well.

These considerations may need to be taken into account before you make a final decision on where you go next, as they could each have an impact on your bottom line in the long-term.

The Microsoft Partner Model

The Microsoft partner model has been changed over the last few years, so partners no longer receive the financial rewards they used to from a percentage of their customers’ fees. This means your hosting costs will be higher than they were previously, as most partners will have increased their fees because the percentage they’re paid is eroding over time.

Cloud Solution Provider Agreements

If you’re working within the framework of a cloud solution provider (CSP) agreement with your Azure hosting partner, you’re no longer locked in or stuck with the limitations that were previously involved.

This frees you up to explore other more cost-effective options for cloud hosting, while retaining as much of your other Azure systems and applications as you like.

For more detail on how this can affect your Azure tenant and how Microsoft has changed this to remove the lock-in, please read our full article on this subject.

Inflation

With inflation on the rise, the OpEx model of cloud infrastructure-as-a-service is a much more appealing prospect than investing a large sum of money into a physical data centre right now.

The lead times on physical servers have also increased as well with the current chip shortages.

The risk involved with the traditional on-premise approach to IT hosting is currently higher than ever before, with the demand for remote work and business agility at an all-time high.

More and more businesses are migrating to the cloud as it continues to present the most financially-sensible option for enterprise IT.

Skills Shortages

The digital skills gap is evident across most industries at the moment, and has been even before the COVID-19 pandemic turned the world upside down. In 2019, for example the Open University’s ‘Bridging the Digital Divide’ report found that 88% of UK organisations admitted to facing a shortage of digital skills.

Finding in-house employees who have sufficient cloud-specific experience is difficult, especially in a job market that’s recovering from ‘the great resignation.’ These people are coming at a very high cost today.

It’s usually more cost-effective to lean on intelligent automated tools to handle many of the core processes for you, rather than hiring someone new and paying them a hefty salary.