Azure Managed Services

Engage with an Azure Managed Service Provider to achieve operational excellence. Adastra implements a cloud-first approach to effectively operate, secure, and maintain your workloads in the Azure cloud.

Adastra Named 2024 Data & AI Americas Partner of the Year

Adastra is proud to have won our 11th Impact Award this year—the Azure Data & AI 2024 Microsoft Americas Partner of the Year Award! We were also recognized as a finalist for three awards: Analytics Partner of the Year (Global), Business Applications (Americas), and Azure Infrastructure and App Innovation (Americas).

The adoption of cloud architecture by organizations is constantly on the rise. Although the cloud presents numerous business advantages, inadequate management can lead to inefficiencies and excessive costs. Many organizations struggle to keep up with the rapid evolution of cloud technologies, cybersecurity risks, and regulatory compliance standards due to a lack of capacity and expertise. Additionally, maintaining in-house technology teams, keeping up with knowledge updates, and managing attrition can drain your budget.

Leading organizations turn to Managed Services Providers (MSP) to ensure that their complex modern data estate is responsive and resilient, while maintaining highly available infrastructure and continuous business operations.

Engaging with a trusted Azure Managed Service Provider takes away the burden of IT workloads, allowing your organization to concentrate on core operations and business innovation. It helps keep your IT environment secure and running, even in case of disasters and other unexpected disruptions. Adastra leverages cloud-native Azure services to optimize your cloud spend and provide effective change and incident management, promoting expansion and business growth.

Why Engage with an Azure Managed Service Provider?

Secure Your Business

Mitigate the risk of security breaches and data loss by leveraging Azure best practices and cloud-native technology and frameworks that provide superior preventative and detection capability.

Boost Innovation

Focus on your core business and innovation strategy to gain a sustainable competitive edge, while Adastra provides cloud services and support according to strict service-level agreements (SLA).

Onboard Top Talent

Utilize the deep technical knowledge and precious industry expertise of our Azure cloud engineers.

Scale Quickly

Embrace service and support capacity levels that help adapt to your fluctuating business cycles and maintain steady, predictable performance at an optimal cost.

Automate Workflows

Automate business workflows by leveraging ready-to-use frameworks that reduce thousands of repetitive tasks and operational overhead.

Reduce Total Cost of Ownership

Ease the costs of maintaining staff and skill levels to effectively meet demands of the ever-evolving cloud landscape.

Cost Management

Optimize the cost of your AWS estate through native services by implementing sustainable cloud cost management frameworks in collaboration with Adastra’s FinOps specialists.

Effective Monitoring

Implement effective, automated monitoring frameworks for critical business processes and assets.

“Adastra helped us take a broader perspective around our analytics platform. Their team of experts established and implemented a future-proof architecture that enables us to scale our Power BI platform across all Magna divisions globally.”

Stefan Tropper
Director, B2B & Solutions, Magna Global IT (Automotive)

Adastra’s Service-Level Agreements

Silver

For environments demanding less-strict SLAs

Gold

Enhanced SLAs for priority platforms and systems

Diamond

Premium SLAs for business-critical platforms and systems

Seamless and Effective Azure Managed Services

Leveraging native Azure and 3rd party services, we offer guidance and execution of operational best practices with specialized automations, skills, and experience best suited to support your environment and applications. Adastra’s Managed Services model provides proactive, preventative, and detection capabilities that raise the operational bar and help reduce risk without constraining agility, allowing you to focus on innovation. We extend your team with operational capabilities including monitoring, incident management, patching, backup & disaster recovery, cost optimization, and maintaining a strong security posture.

Our cloud-first focus and over two decades of global data management expertise positions us to effectively operate, secure, and maintain your cloud environments and workloads.

We fulfill the following key service needs:

SLA-Based Services

  • Provide SLA-based support via our centralized service desk.

  • Incident management for cloud infrastructure and applications.

  • Request fulfillment.

  • Monitoring and event management.

  • Problem management.

Cloud Risk Assessment and Management

  • Maintain a strong security posture by performing cloud risk assessments with remediation expertise.

  • Conduct tool-driven risk assessments and benchmarking against industry compliance standards, including the Center for Internet Security (CIS).

  • Internal vulnerability scanning with cloud-native or 3rd party tools.

  • Patch, maintain, and upgrade (especially relevant for cloud IaaS) – key focus areas include operating systems (OS), databases (DB), data integration applications, data orchestration and scheduling applications, and data visualization applications.

Cloud Cost Management

  • Implement budgets and receive alerts on key cloud resources.

  • Right-size resources and services.

  • Detect unused or underutilized resources.

  • Leverage automation to start or stop resources that are schedule or event-dependent.

  • Implement tagging policies to enable a business or project view of cloud costs.

  • Identify candidates for Reserved Instances, if offered by your cloud provider.

Application Maintenance and Enhancements

Provide staff capacity for ongoing application changes and enhancements. Our support teams are aligned with our practices and include the following core areas of expertise.

  • Data engineering: acquisition, orchestration, and curation.

  • Visualization, analytics, and reporting.

  • Machine learning models.

  • Low code applications for business automation.

Our deployment management expertise enables us to strengthen your deployment management processes and governance. This includes optimizing DevOps frameworks and CI/CD pipelines.

Your Data Is Secure with Us

Information security is always a top priority. We protect your information by having in place proper safeguards in terms of processes, tools, and reliable infrastructure.

ISO 27001

PCI-DSS

SOC2 TYPE2

TISAX

Engage with a Trusted MSP

Stay focused on your business strategy with turnkey support for your cloud, data and AI environments.

Azure Managed Services Engagement Model

1

Discovery

Utilize our guided discovery phase with accelerators to obtain an understanding of your support needs, scope, objectives, budget, and timelines.

2

Service Design

Map our SLAs to your organization’s specific needs and desired outcomes. Define service scope, objectives and timelines.

3

Service Transitioning and Onboarding

A formal, structured, one-time process to effectively transition service scope to Adastra. Primary milestones include:

  • Establish a service transition plan and manage the process throughout
  • Assess operational readiness of in-scope environment, a structured tool-driven evaluation
  • Knowledge transfer and staff and customer onboarding
  • Establish an accountability matrix using the RASIC model
4

Service Management

Fulfill all service management and reporting commitments in accordance with service scope. Examples include:

  • Monthly and quarterly business reviews. A focus on SLAs and key service management metrics, root cause analysis and remediations, and operational highlights.
  • Vendor governance and compliance commitments, e.g., external audits, business continuity and disaster recovery exercises, incident response exercises.
  • Continual service improvement: past accomplishments and future objectives.
Success Story

Managed Services for Global Automotive Supplier’s Sales Database

Our client required a partner to help transform their global sales forecasting and analytics platform and provide multi-time zone management and support. They lacked capacity to scale to support diverse solution and time zone requirements.

Adastra delivered a reliable and stable platform that supports their dynamically-evolving reporting and analytics needs.

99.9%

availability of cube and reports

30

second response time

24/7

service and support

Success Story

Managed Services for Card Analytics Solution

Our client required a hosted and managed data and analytics solution to support credit card product/portfolio management. The platform had to meet or exceed regulatory compliance, risk management, reporting and analytics requirements.

Adastra delivered a cloud-based, compliant platform providing business continuity and the flexibility to adapt to industry needs and the regulatory landscape.

$1+

million cost savings

99.9%

availability and uptime

24/7

service and support

Why Take Advantage of the Azure CSP Program?

The Azure CSP program offers cost-effective pricing, flexible billing, simplified management, and value-added services that can help customers optimize their Azure usage and reduce costs. By working with a CSP partner, you can also benefit from expert advice and support to help you achieve your business goals.

One Hand to Shake

Engage with a single partner across Azure, Power Platform, Dynamics and Microsoft/Office 365, and licensing.

Simplicity

Simplify business relationships with only one contract to manage, providing complete visibility and control on cost.

Growth Mindset

Experience no long-term lock-in, but just-in-time provisioning. Grow when you are ready!

Cost-Effectiveness

Get lower prices with Azure Reservations, right-size the consumed resources and services, move non-critical data to lower cost storage, and detect unused or underutilized resources.

Engage with a Trusted Cloud Solution Provider (CSP)

Adastra is a Cloud Solution Provider (CSP) direct reseller in Canada, USA, and the European Union (EU), delivering end-to-end customer experience for solutions and services across the Azure cloud spectrum. Take advantage of the Adastra’s CSP service offerings:

Core (leveraged by all CSP customers)

  • Up to 20 hours/month subscription level support at no additional cost

  • Billing and invoicing

  • Cost management, monitoring, and optimization

  • Service desk monitoring, provisioning, and request fulfilment

  • Ticket management and escalation with Microsoft Support

Managed (additional managed services can be purchased)

  • Service design and fit to our SLA

  • Application support, including DevOps (CI/CD)

  • For IaaS environments, patching, maintenance, upgrades, and hardening according to Center for Internet Security (CIS) standards

  • Infrastructure support (IaaS or PaaS)

  • System and event monitoring/alerting

  • Change and deployment management

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the Azure CSP program?

The Azure CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) program is a partner program offered by Microsoft Azure that allows managed service providers, resellers, and other IT service providers to offer Azure cloud services to their customers.

Azure Reservations help you save money by committing to one-year or three-year plans for multiple products. Committing allows you to get a discount on the resources you use. Reservations can significantly reduce your resource costs by up to 72% from pay-as-you-go prices. Reservations provide a billing discount and don’t affect the runtime state of your resources. After you purchase a reservation, the discount automatically applies to matching resources.

You can pay for a reservation up front or monthly. The total cost of up-front and monthly Reservations is the same and you don’t pay any extra fees when you choose to pay monthly. Monthly payment is available for Azure Reservations, not third-party products.

The Azure CSP program offers cost-effectiveness for the following reasons:

  • Azure Reservations – prepay for resources such as virtual machines, storage, and SQL databases for a specific period, typically one or three years. By committing to using these resources for a longer period, you can receive a significant discount compared to the pay-as-you-go pricing model.
  • Right-Sizing – optimize the size of your cloud resources, such as instances, databases, and storage, to match your actual workload demands. It is an essential practice for cost optimization in the cloud because over-provisioning leads to higher costs, while under-provisioning can cause performance issues.
  • Storage Optimization – move non-critical data to lower cost storage in the Azure cloud.
  • Resource optimization – Detect unused and/or underutilized resources so you can optimize the Azure cloud consumption.
  • Automation – take advantage of automation capabilities to start/stop event-based scheduled resources.

Success Stories

Let’s achieve operational excellence with Azure.

Get in touch.