Our Public Cloud Partner
The challenges we help with
Legacy infrastructure makes full migration in one go difficult
We’ll migrate anything that’s a good match to a Managed Azure public cloud service. Whatever we can’t move (if there is something), we’ll make sure it works with your public cloud through a hybrid cloud strategy. Over time we’ll move any legacy applications so you’ll have everything in the right place.
Your costs are spiralling, and are tricky to forecast
Our services usually knock your costs down by switching from CapEx to OpEx, giving you a predictable monthly bill.
You’re worried about compliance and security
Microsoft Azure cloud services come with native features for both user and application security. We bolster them when needed with our SD-WAN, Cloud Firewall, and Managed Security.
You don’t have the skills you need in-house to manage a cloud
This is where our managed private cloud comes up trumps. We have over 200 trained support and engineer staff to take the reins, so you don’t have to. And… we have advanced technical support teams on tap directly from Microsoft whenever we need it.
Your hands are tied by limitations of your current solution
All of our services piggy-back the latest technology, with a constant focus on performance and reliability. It’s also unlikely you’ll suffer the same constraints when adopting an Azure environment or a hybrid approach. With us you can use one, or a mix of solutions, to flex as your business needs more cloud resources.
Choose the right Azure managed service for you
To help keep things straightforward, we’ve bundled the most common things we’re asked for into a single foundational service we call ‘Essential’. It includes all the features you simply can’t do without.
Some businesses (with more advanced needs) decide to build on our Essential service by adding one or more wide-ranging managed services. Naturally, we’ve called this our ‘Enhanced’ managed service. This includes extra support for things like Guest OS management, data protection, dedicated service managers and management of advanced security capabilities.
We’re all-in for transparency and fairness, that’s why we’re keen for you to pick and pay for the exact support you need, instead of paying for support as a percentage of your total monthly cloud cost.
Essential
This service primarily gives you support for basic capabilities within your cloud management portal. This covers your cloud computing, storage, networking, and basic security functionality. We’ve also added support for Azure Backup and Azure Site Recovery. With our Essential service, you’ll have some access to data management too.
Enhanced
Builds on our Essential offering by adding advanced feature capabilities to your platform. These cover guest OS management, advanced security, database support, united endpoint management, Azure Virtual Desktop, and support for hundreds of custom logs and metrics to monitor every facet of your cloud services.
How we'll engage with your business from start to finish
You can choose from our Essential or Enhanced managed cloud services. Both use a set of clearly defined stages that are aligned to ISO 20000-1 and ITIL service management frameworks. This structure means you’ll get a consistent and reliable experience right the way through your partnership with us:
Engage
Early engagement is all about requirements gathering. So we have a complete understanding of your business, team, current setup and objectives before we fully plan your Azure cloud journey.
Plan
Here we assess your readiness for cloud adoption and work on a strategy for migrating you to the Azure cloud. This planning involves all areas of your infrastructure including connectivity, on-premises environments and any applications you use.
Design
We then bring your Azure cloud to life and work with you to create technical designs. These are created in line with Microsoft Azure cloud best practices (along with any governance requirements). We can also run a proof of concept at this stage, to refine any further requirements, and get internal sign off.
Build
The build stage is where we’ll deploy Microsoft Azure as part of your now well-defined cloud strategy. Whether that’s building from scratch, migrating, or building upon your existing platforms.
Deliver & Support
Once you’re up and running with your newly optimised cloud services, we work with you to ensure your IT team is ready to support your new cloud model. Or you can sit back and relax with one of our fully managed services.
Continuous improvement
Continuous improvement is at the heart of everything we do. We look to work with you over the long term, so we’ll continually look for areas of improvement (and how you’re utilising your Azure resources) as technologies and your needs change.
As you can see, it’s a detailed process. But it allows us to work in partnership with you to deliver a fit-for-purpose Azure cloud environment specifically set up to deliver what your business needs now, and into the future.
How we'll transform your cloud with Microsoft's framework
When we’re creating your Azure environment, we closely follow Microsoft’s cloud adoption framework. This way we make sure your business needs are looped in, and we cover governance and management methods from start to finish.
There are four steps when it comes to creating your Azure environment:
Define your cloud adoption strategy
Create a cloud adoption plan
Get ready – with a cloud operating model
Roll out the cloud
Step 1 – Define your cloud adoption strategy
We’ll make sure we understand your business outcomes inside and out, so your cloud services will match exactly what you need. We’ll always start by creating a cloud adoption strategy to help you improve business agility, reduce costs, and define your motivations. We’ll create this strategy by:
- documenting your business outcomes
- evaluating your financial considerations
- understanding your technical considerations
- creating a business case
- sharing the strategy with your business
- helping you get buy-in for your cloud strategy.
Step 2 – Create a cloud adoption plan
Now we have a concrete cloud strategy, it’s time to put together a cloud adoption plan that’ll meet the goals you set. We’ll work out:
- what your current digital estate looks like (and whether it’s meeting your needs)
- if you have any skills gaps (so we can figure out how best to support your people)
- how to align the right people in your business with key cloud processes
- your cloud adoption plan (managing any changes that could impact your business and your people).
Now it’s time to decide on the best way to migrate all of your data and applications over to your new azure cloud solutions. There are 5 ways to do this (and we’ll pick the one that best suits you):
- Re-host (lift and shift)
- Refactor (transform to PaaS)
- Re-architect (modify application architecture before migration)
- Rebuild (rebuild the application code from scratch)
- Replace (replace the application with an alternative)
Step 3 – Get ready – with a cloud operating model
Now it’s time to turn your cloud solutions on. And for that to happen, we’ll need a cloud operating model.
A cloud operating model shows how you’ll run your new cloud technologies. And it should align with your strategy, governance, risk requirements, available skills, and financial plans.
With your cloud operating model, we’ll make sure:
- everything is well managed – we’ll do this by aligning processes (ours and yours) so we can meet the operational needs of your cloud technologies.
- all your governance bases are covered – we’ll understand your governance and compliance needs, so we can make sure you meet them, now and in the future.
- you have a robust security strategy – we’ll work with you to define how you’ll secure your cloud when it comes to your people, data and cloud applications.
- you have everything you need to make your cloud a success – together we’ll make sure you’re organised with the right functions, technologies and skills you need to fulfil your cloud strategy. And how you’ll track its success.
Step 4 – Roll out the Cloud
Now you’re ready. And it’s time to migrate to your Microsoft Azure cloud. We’ll choose a non-critical workload to go first (to make sure everything’s working as expected).
Some businesses want to go further than a cloud migration though. As they’re keen to innovate with new technologies. This is usually to improve their market position, increase efficiency, or deliver transformative experiences to customers. If you choose to adopt new technologies, we can help with that too. And we’ll make sure it’s a success by:
- understanding your business values along with you and your customer’s needs (to create a hypothesis)
- building your first Minimum Viable Product (MVP) in development sprints
- measuring and learning from the MVP by gathering continuous feedback
- refining the original hypothesis (now we’ve tested it).
Want to know how Managed Azure can help your business?
We know about all types of cloud
Management of cloud infrastructure is complex, especially in the modern day. Public cloud, private cloud, hybrid cloud – there are lots of options to choose from. We’ll work with you to find the right place to store your data and workloads – using the best possible cloud solution to help you connect, secure, and scale your business.
We understand that the support and insight of our managed services is much more valuable than just selling you technology – anyone can do that. So, we’ll give you a very clearly prescribed service. There’s no ambiguity in responsibilities and expectations – we form positive relationships, built on transparency and trust.
Our cloud specialists are experts in all things Microsoft, from 365 to Surfaces and of course, Azure cloud solutions. They have thousands of hours of combined experience assessing, designing, and implementing fit-for-purpose and “for you” public cloud services. So, our cloud specialists can support digital transformation while embedding strategic business value through ongoing partnerships.
The people who power our Azure managed services
The real value of our cloud solutions lies in the trained experts who power our Azure managed services. You’ll have all the expertise you need from onboarding to deployments, right through to support and continuous improvement. We’re by your side throughout the entire lifecycle of your managed service with us. So, you can simply get in with doing what you do best – running your business.
Why you’re likely to pick us out from a crowd
With iomart, you’ll always work with someone who knows this stuff inside out – they have the qualifications to prove it. So you’ll always get top-class first-line technical support and consulting services from us.
Our managed service gives you a robust support wrap around your secure cloud service.
You won’t have to fund, grow, and retain your internal technology teams – you’ll have access to our 200+ support and operations engineers.
Every second of every day we offer you an ITIL-aligned service desk with specialist knowledge, and management capability, to proactively manage your cloud service.
You can rely on processes to run smoothly – we’ve honed them over many years, and developed repeatable success through things like service cataloguing and item mapping.
Our event management will ping an iomart engineer about any service outages and degradation, so they’ll be quick off the mark to fix any incidents and give you a quick and informed response.
We guarantee a speedy response and resolution for all incidents related to managed public cloud elements, and any major incidents.
Depending on the Essential or Enhanced services you have, we’ll regularly patch and update your cloud infrastructure. It helps mitigate against security vulnerabilities and keeps you in sight of new features.
We have more regulatory certifications than any managed service provider in the UK.
They trust us, and they tell the best stories
A word from a selection of global brands who’ve followed a similar cloud journey
Trusted to deliver by these brands
