by Anthony Koochew
Founder & CEO
Anthony is an Architect with over 15 years experience helping clients realise the most value from Microsoft Azure, Office 365 and EMS. View full profile.
When Azured first entered the cloud managed services market we used a traditional unit-based servicing model from my time as an infrastructure architect. The only problem was this model was built out of problems that didn’t exist in the cloud.
- HDD Failure? Nope
- AC Failure? Nope
- Tape swapping? Double nope
Breaking the cardinal rule
So we had a problem; we had sold a service that didn’t make sense and were breaking the cardinal rule of Azured: we were offering no value. We ripped up the contract and I challenged the team to find a better way.
We had found that often customers didn’t know what to do, where to go or how to get there when it came to Cloud. Resulting in cost overruns, inefficient application designs and insecure builds. And to us, the lack of clarity made sense. Azured is built around the needs of cloud; infrastructure guys who can script and developers who understand platforms. It is entirely reasonable that customers weren’t appropriately setup to manage cloud and tackle the problem.
The road to redemption is paved with opportunity
As we saw it, it wasn’t just about creating a managed service that added value in cloud, it was also an opportunity to right some of the wrongs we had seen in the managed services industry.
Proactive service utilisation: I wanted to encourage people to use our service, proactively approaching customers who were underutilizing their service to offer value adds.
Support hours for planning: I wanted to empower customers to bounce questions and ideas off us and not exhaust their service. Especially when frequently these conversations contribute to the avoidance of problems down the track as well as new business growth and development.
Lean growth: I wanted to build a service with no bloatware, delivering easy to understand add-ons for further management or security. Building a valuable and useful service, brick by brick.
Results focused: I wanted to avoid finger pointing between vendors by ensuring we would look into any problems first and figure out fault later.
L3/4 Escalation Services by Azured
What we do is very simple; we work with customers to understand their problems then solve them with technology. Not just IT problems however, problems that affect finance or HR and teams outside of IT. Problems that we are uniquely suited to solve given our understanding of data, automation and Cloud.
With an expert team across the goliath that is Microsoft Cloud, another way of framing what the service offers is by simply stating what it does NOT:
- Body shopping (long term resource assignments)
- Level 1 or 2 works
- Something outside of our core skillset e.g. Dynamics or Mitel
Ultimately Cloud is different to a traditional on-premises model and requires a new approach to manage it. In an era of Pay-As-You-Go, scale up and scale out, you need a managed service that is there when you need it, can aid in avoiding pitfalls and help navigate meaningful growth further into cloud technologies.
To learn more about Escalation Services with Azured, visit our webpage here.
