‌In our previous blog post on Azure Managed Services, What Can Azure Managed Services Do For Your Business? we looked at how businesses leverage managed services to maximize the value of their Azure infrastructure. In this article, we take a closer look at some high-impact optimization opportunities that enhance infrastructure performance, scalability, and resilience.

If you want to skip the technical details and just want actionable insights for optimizing your Azure environment, check out our free, instant Azure Assessment!

Many businesses lack the time, knowledge, and resources to optimize their cloud infrastructure. At best, optimization is carried out on an ad-hoc basis: businesses react to issues when they arise. Time is spent extinguishing fires instead of delivering services. At worst, businesses do nothing to optimize cloud infrastructure and eat the cost of poor performance and availability.

Managing cloud infrastructure isn’t the core of your business, so it’s unsurprising that your focus is elsewhere. You want to spend time serving your customers—focusing on the core of your business. At VIAcode, Azure is our core competence. We manage your Azure infrastructure so that you can focus your business’s time and resources where they generate the most value.  

Azure managed services help businesses to get ahead of the game. We empower our clients to build robust infrastructure that eliminates risk. We implement rich monitoring and alerts to make sure that suboptimal outcomes are observed before they cause significant operational issues.

Cost Optimization

VIAcode optimizes Azure infrastructure costs to reduce waste while maximizing performance, availability, and scalability.

In 2019, businesses wasted over $14 billion on cloud resources that they didn’t need. Provisioning infrastructure is far easier in the cloud. IT departments once had tight control over bare metal infrastructure provisioning, but today we can provision cloud infrastructure almost as quickly as we can click a button on a web interface.

The result is a vast array of shadow IT infrastructure, resources that are deployed but unmonitored and unmanaged, costing businesses billions. At VIAcode, the biggest causes of waste we see are idle resources, over-provisioned resources, orphaned resources, and suboptimal pricing options.

VIAcode’s managed services will help your business save up to 40 percent on Azure cloud costs. We’ll make sure you take full advantage of infrastructure cost savings with strategies that include: 

• Transitioning to reserved instances 
• Deallocating idle infrastructure
• Downgrading VMs, databases, and other resources while implementing autoscaling to maintain optimal performance and availability.

Security Enhancement

VIAcode secures Azure cloud infrastructure, eliminating security vulnerabilities caused by limited monitoring coverage, misconfiguration, and inadequate security practices.

Cloud infrastructure deployments grow rapidly and the surface exposed to potential security threats grows too. Businesses face security challenges that would have been hard to imagine a decade ago as they deal with on-demand cloud infrastructure, IoT devices, ubiquitous remote teams, and more.

Many businesses migrate to the cloud with the belief that the vendor takes care of security for them. That’s a myth. Security is a continuous process for both the user and the vendor. You’re never done with security. It’s a long-term process that calls for constant reassessment as your infrastructure evolves, implementing layers of security with a zero-trust attitude.

Microsoft Azure is a secure cloud platform, but built-in security only goes so far. Azure operates a shared responsibility security model. Microsoft secures the physical layer and builds secure services, but users are responsible for the security of server operating systems, network controls, applications, client end-points, and other parts of their cloud infrastructure deployment.

Our Azure Managed Services team takes a layered approach to security optimization. We start with zero-cost security optimizations such as encryption at rest before working with clients to extend security throughout their platform, implementing security strategies such as:

• Encryption in transit 
• DDoS protection 
• Audit data collection and security monitoring
• Multi-factor authentication

Our managed services are flexible, and the above are just a few of the security optimizations we can make to our client’s Azure infrastructure. 

Monitoring and Alerts

VIAcode implements comprehensive monitoring, alerts, and notifications that provide actionable insights into applications and Azure infrastructure.

Azure Monitor does not provide out-of-the-box alerts and notifications. Unlike SCOM, it lacks an ecosystem of Management Packs with tailored notifications and alerts. Users must implement their own alerts and notifications on top of Azure’s metrics and logs.

Consequently, many businesses have little insight into their Azure infrastructure. They can’t react to incidents that cause security, availability, and performance issues. They can’t optimize infrastructure spending because they don’t know how their money is spent. Lack of actionable notifications makes businesses slow to react and substantially extends mitigation timelines and root cause analysis.

VIAcode managed services include comprehensive monitoring with notifications for the alerts your business needs to know about, including:

• Service and platform availability 
• Capacity monitoring 
• End-point availability 
• Cost monitoring with budgets and alerts.

DevOps Integration

VIAcode helps businesses to streamline their DevOps and SRE processes with an end-to-end live support process.

Thirty percent of revenue loss can be attributed to inefficient processes. Cloud platforms are inherently agile, but if a business doesn’t have adequate infrastructure and incident management processes in place, that agility can amplify existing issues.

VIAcode managed services focus on improving visibility, establishing accountability, and facilitating collaboration. We provide end-to-end integration of Azure Monitor and the VIAcode Cloud Maturity Assessment with Azure DevOps, collaboration tools like Microsoft Teams, and Azure’s auto-remediation solutions via the VIAcode Incident Management System.

We make sure that your development and operations teams have access to the information they need to work together seamlessly.

VIAcode Azure Managed Services

Our Azure managed services team has been building and deploying application infrastructure on Azure since it was first introduced and on Microsoft platforms for many years before.  Our leadership team worked for Microsoft on Azure services for a decade after Microsoft acquired our earlier business and its technology.  We continue to work closely with Microsoft, building Azure solutions such as the VIAcode Azure Data Factory Monitor, SCOM Alert Management, and more. 

We have a deep understanding of Azure’s services, their strengths, and their trade-offs. With Azure managed services, that knowledge and experience can be put to work for your company.

To help your business get started with Azure optimization, we offer a free Azure optimization assessment that includes capacity and budget analysis, resource optimization strategies for Azure VMs, Azure Web Apps, Azure SQL, Azure Storage, and more.