For long-standing Microsoft customers who want more from the cloud, or organisations looking to innovate with new technologies, Microsoft’s Azure cloud computing platform is a recognised market leader and the perfect destination.
The challenge for organisations is finding the best way to optimise a powerful and feature-rich platform. This is where Azure Expert Managed Service Providers come in.
What is a Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Service Provider (MSP)
Azure Expert Managed Service Providers are specialised Microsoft partners who have undergone a rigorous and independent technical validation process to demonstrate their proficiency and expertise in delivering Azure managed services. This elite accreditation ensures that they meet the highest standards set by Microsoft for technical capability, customer service, and service delivery.
Being an Microsoft Azure Expert MSP means having a proven track record of successfully implementing and managing complex Azure environments for clients. Azure Expert MSPs possess deep knowledge and experience across a wide range of Microsoft solutions, ensuring that they can align Azure’s diverse services with each client’s unique business requirements. Azure Expert MSPs are equipped to help organizations optimise their use of the Azure resources, providing end-to-end services that cover the entire cloud lifecycle – from initial planning and migration to ongoing management and optimization.
Ergo has been an Azure Expert MSP since 2021 and has won the Microsoft Ireland Partner of the Year Award six times, most recently in 2024. In the last decade we have grown our competencies around Microsoft to ensure its diverse solutions and services are properly aligned to each client’s unique business requirements.
When choosing a partner to develop and deliver an Azure cloud strategy, there is a checklist of seven key skills you must be sure they have.
4. Hybrid and multicloud capabilities
5. Business continuity and security expertise
1. Deep Microsoft expertise
The knowledge needed to realise the full value of Azure is vast, from setting up the right foundations in the cloud to achieving good governance around increasingly complex subscriptions. Ergo has a cloud adoption framework to ensure you run your business in a well-architected Azure environment, whether you are migrating applications from an on-premise location or carrying out cloud-native development.
There are a different Azure landing zones for different projects with a range of design areas to choose from. Configuring them correctly is the vital step between planning a migration and the actual re-platforming of applications and workloads. It’s the job of your Microsoft Azure Expert MSP to match them to your needs, whether it’s choosing between a platform or application landing zone, or aligning a management hierarchy to services accessed by a global organisation.
There are administrative as well as technical skills required, particularly around Azure subscriptions. As you expand your use of Azure resources, it’s imperative for user adoption and good governance to instigate a best-practice approach. The way to do this is by setting up management groups based on service ownership, and by providing a governance layer to establish who is responsible for the budget and resource management.
All of this comes easy to Ergo because we own Micromail, Ireland’s leading Microsoft LSP (Licensing Solution Provider). It enables our team to optimise the value as well as the performance of the technologies we deploy. At the same time, technical demands call for leading-edge skills that are constantly evolving, which is why Ergo places so much emphasis on skills and professional development. We have five ‘Most Valuable Microsoft Professionals’ in our Microsoft practice, the highest skills accreditation that Microsoft awards.
2. Cloud lifecycle delivery
Planning a successful cloud strategy starts with setting goals. It’s about working out what legacy apps can be migrated; what needs to be built from scratch as a cloud-first app or service, and designing a platform where they are all seamlessly integrated. Expect your Azure Managed Service Provider to demonstrate a granular understanding of your IT estate as it is – where apps reside and their interdependencies – and come up with a clear roadmap for how it could better serve the business in the cloud.
This is the start of the cloud delivery lifecycle – contained in the Ergo cloud strategy framework – where workloads are analysed and cloud readiness assessed.
Every organisation will have legacy applications that are fundamental to the business. Integral to any cloud migration is taking the opportunity to modernise applications and leverage the
features and benefits of running on Azure. For the discerning Azure Expert Managed Service Provider, it’s the preferred option to a ‘lift and shift’, where there’s a danger of replicating long-standing issues by simply moving on-premise apps to the cloud.
Modernisation and app replatforming have many benefits, from improving performance to facilitating greater integration with the rest of the business, opening the door to new workflows and services. It will also reduce operational costs and give your IT people the chance to innovate around business processes in a way that is impossible on premise.
3. Sector-specific knowledge
Every technology decision should be driven by the unique needs of each business, which is why Azure Experts MSPs must be customer centric. That means understanding client goals, roadblocks and aspirations. Familiarity with different sectors is essential for helping client companies differentiate and stand out from the competition.
At Ergo, we make it our business to know our client’s business just as well as our own. It could be a government department that needs to better serve citizens through digital engagement. Or a public sector agency that wants better access to data, while retaining data sovereignty to meet regulatory requirements. Both scenarios can be achieved by the public sector harnessing the power of Azure.
Compliance is a big issue for financial services companies, which typically fall into two camps: indigenous firms identifying parts of their business that would benefit from digital transformation or multinationals looking to integrate a local solution into a global strategy. A wide range of Azure-based solutions can be tailored to advance digital strategies for financial services.
4. Hybrid and multicloud capabilities
Very few organisations will be running their Azure platform in isolation. They will have legacy IT in data centres or on premise; many will be running services from other public and private clouds. It’s a complex ecosystem to keep on top of, demanding a range of hybrid and multicloud management skills to run machines hosted outside of Azure.
The Azure Expert MSP will recognise this reality and leverage tools and services built into Azure to make the job easier. Azure Arc is a bridge that extends the Microsoft cloud out to other environments, allowing you to secure, develop and operate workloads with Azure services.
It provides a unified platform for consistent management across multicloud, on-premise and edge environments, covering a range of non-Microsoft workloads. The Azure portal becomes a single-window dashboard for managing a range of IT resources, wherever they are running.
5. Business continuity and security expertise
Fundamental to every organisation is BCDR (Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery), along with the highest levels of cybersecurity. Needs become greater as dependency on IT services increases. When systems fail or are the target of cyberattacks, the business risks costly outages and reputational damage. Both BCDR and security will be money pits unless your Azure Expert MSP has the skills to analyse granular requirements and deliver levels of resilience that are proportionate to your risk profile.
Ensuring business resilience is achieved through a combination of processes, tools and architecture. They are built on top of a DR plan to ensure continued operations of critical business services during an outage. An Azure BCDR strategy can address all the biggest challenges, whether it’s making sure backups are immutable and indelible or using additional Azure regions as failover locations.
Moving to the cloud brings new security challenges. Microsoft invests around $1 billion in cloud security each year, which means most businesses will benefit for levels of protection that would be impossible to emulate on their own. Tools and services are increasingly AI-powered to keep you at the leading edge of threat protection and remediation, from malware protection with the Microsoft Defender Suite to Microsoft Sentinel, a cloud-native SIEM (Security Information and Event Management) platform.
It’s the role of an Azure Expert MSP to make sure you use these services in a way that is aligned to your business. At Ergo, for example, we provide an MDR (Managed Detection and Response) service – real-time threat protection, detection and response across cloud and on-premises infrastructure – that uses the Microsoft security suite to benefit organisations that don’t have an in-house security team or the resources to manage their SOC (Security Operations Centre).
6. Focus on value and performance
Continual improvement around value and performance are the ultimate reward for going with the right Azure Expert MSP. The analogy of ‘cloud as a journey’ is important because it makes it clear that you risk damaging your business if you treat Azure as a tactical investment, rather than a long-term strategy.
The landing zones within Azure are where you start to create a scalable cloud solution that will continually deliver on value and performance. It’s about streamlining Azure governance with management groups, a process that requires deep expertise from your MSP. It’s a process that crosses into subscription services, which provide control over resource usage, reporting and payments – something that comes easily to Ergo because of our relationship with Micromail, a Microsoft LSP (Licensing Solution Provider) and part of the Ergo group of companies.
Many businesses have experience of cloud consumptions costs running out of control, a reminder that not all Azure Expert MSPs are equal. This is why optimising cloud value is integral to Ergo managed services. We make predictability and transparency part of our cloud proposition, establishing governance guardrails at the outset to avoid ‘bill shock’. It’s the role of
the Azure Expert MSP to come up with a cost-effective solution and deliver on value as well as performance.
7. Future-proof roadmap
What the Azure Expert MSP can do for you that is almost impossible to do yourself is use their special relationship with Microsoft to take advantage of fast-evolving technologies. At Ergo we make sure we keep you at the leading edge. Right now, it’s about pathways to becoming a data-driven organisation and finding ways to be more agile in the face of a challenging business environment where disruption is rife.
A great enabler for becoming data-driven is Microsoft Fabric, a data platform that brings together various data services and AI capabilities in Azure, providing a single window view of all your company’s data. Because its closely integrated with Microsoft Azure, taking advantage of the robust infrastructure and security features, it minimises the need to manage data infrastructure components. You can streamline your approach to analytics and accelerate the path to AI-driven insights and generative AI experiences.
Getting started with Azure AI services is an important stepping stone in future-proofing your organisation, because it’s the next technology wave that’s expected to have the biggest impact on businesses. Through a combination of Copilot, a digital assistant that increases productivity, and the Microsoft Intelligent Data Platform, which simplifies access to real-time data insights, you will take significant steps towards becoming a data-driven business.
Conclusion
To better understand how an Azure Expert MSP turns all the above skills into a deliverable cloud solution, let’s look at how we work at Ergo. Every engagement starts with fact-finding, where we get to know your business as well as your IT environment. Workshops follow, which is where we begin to identify the solutions that are the best fit for the business. Once the components have been agreed, we enter the architectural design phase.
Near the end of the deployment we introduce infrastructure monitoring capabilities, setting you up for a managed service focussed on continuous improvement. And by keeping your Azure environment at the leading edge, you will be better placed to innovate and take advantage of new and emerging technologies.
Along the way, as your Azure footprint grows, keep looking for incremental gains from your managed services partner. At Ergo, we will continue to optimise costs by ensuring they are right sized, scaling them down as well as up as business demand fluctuates.
Rewards from working with a strong Azure MSP are, however, about more than value and performance. Leveraging Azure’s modernisation tools, for example, will not just drag an app into the cloud era, it will turn you into a cloud-native organisation. The strategic goal from an Azure cloud journey is to achieve business transformation, empowering your organisation with tools and services that will allow you to continuously innovate and achieve competitive advantage in your marketplace.
