New Delhi: As Microsoft’s Azure cloud service is gaining popularity with businesses, many of them are relying on a managed services provider (MSP) to implement it successfully.
A NetEnrich survey of IT professionals in large and medium-size businesses highlights that 62 percent of respondents use the cloud service in some ways. Microsoft Azure is growing, registering revenue of $6.9 billion last quarter. A key takeaway was that Azure use is high – 46 percent of respondents are running at least half of their IT infrastructure and workloads on Microsoft’s cloud service — and companies are relying on channel providers to help them achieve various business and technical benefits, according to the study.
Many surveyed respondents cited channel companies as key to their use of and success with Microsoft Azure. 67 percent said they were “very likely” to engage a Managed Services Provider (MSP) in the next year to migrate to Azure or to manage their cloud and/or on-premises environment, states the study.
“Microsoft Azure is clearly growing its position in the public cloud market as companies of all sizes look to modernize infrastructure, deploy new services quickly and reduce costs,” said, Justin Crotty, Senior VP and GM for Channel Sales and Marketing at NetEnrich.
“We are hearing this from our channel partners all the time. Their customers are moving aggressively to public cloud and they need support from partners to migrate and manage workloads and applications. We’re able to help distributors, resellers and MSPs by getting them trained on best practices for setting up, monitoring and managing Azure instances,” added Crotty.
The top benefit of working with a MSP to manage Azure was security, backups, disaster recovery planning and protection (72 percent). The second biggest benefit was discovery and inventory of IT resources (65 percent), followed by assessment of cost and ROI and to develop a cloud roadmap (59 percent).
Meanwhile, 63 percent of respondents prefer to work with small, nimble service providers or individual consultants, said the study.