When HOSTING made the decision to migrate over 700 environments to Azure, its management team agreed it was the perfect opportunity to expand their arsenal of best practices and invest in the skillsets of their people—some of the secret sauce of their customer service methodology.
“The process of using our internal teams to fine-tune this massive number of customer environments with such a variety of applications and diversity of workloads was a real investment in our managed service business,” says Tricia Pattee, Vice President of Project Management. “We went through the same process a customer would to move legacy systems to Azure. Microsoft helped us get there with trainings and certifications, and now our teams are in a unique position to guide our customers through their journeys to the cloud with first-hand exposure and fewer unknowns.”
Strong Microsoft partnership
“We have a long-standing relationship with HOSTING and have been working together to build a scalable Azure cloud managed services practice at HOSTING,” says Mark Rice, General Manager of Managed Services Providers, Microsoft. “They have a large and growing customer base that will benefit from the various innovative services on the Azure platform. It made perfect sense to team up and offer our expertise to help HOSTING migrate a substantial number of customers to Azure in an efficient and beneficial way to our mutual customers.”
HOSTING delivers a diverse range of solutions including hybrid deployment scenarios with Azure and seamlessly integrates services across HOSTING’s data centers, Azure, and Office365 allowing customers to be more agile and operate more efficiently. With its move to Azure, HOSTING has already seen the financial benefits of moving off legacy systems along with the upgraded capabilities and technologies. “We’ve gained scalability, cost savings, and operating efficiencies with Azure and we expect that TCO to remain steady as you factor in the comprehensive set of cloud services that developers and IT professionals use to build, deploy, and manage applications,” according to Sherman.
This is particularly important to HOSTING’s customers and its sophisticated set of security requirements. HOSTING focuses heavily on managing workloads for customers in these highly regulated industries. Azure’s broad compliance standards coverage and security feature set allows HOSTING to more efficiently grow its customers’ environments while continuing to safe guard their data and businesses.
The value of first-hand experience
“The best practices we built, and the breadth of our first-hand experience really provide a tremendous value-add to our customers as we guide them to the right solution and efficiently manage their services,” adds Sherman. “We’re proud to provide managed cloud leadership to help our customers achieve better business outcomes with a ‘Guidance Level Agreement’ service guarantee from the best team in the industry.”