Businesses rely on managed services providers to move to Azure
While 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.
According to a new survey by cloud and IT services company NetEnrich, 67 percent are 'very likely' to engage an MSP in the next year to migrate to Azure or to manage their cloud and/or on-premises environment.
The survey also underlines Azure's popularity with 46 percent of respondents running at least half of their IT infrastructure and workloads on the service.
The top benefit of working with a MSP to manage Azure is seen as security, backups, disaster recovery planning and protection (72 percent). Second is discovery and inventory of IT resources (65 percent), followed by assessment of cost and ROI and to develop a cloud roadmap (59 percent).
"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," says Justin Crotty, Senior VP and GM for Channel Sales and Marketing at NetEnrich. "We’re 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."
Among other findings are that 62 percent of respondents operate a multi-cloud environment including Azure. 30 percent say the greatest challenge with Azure adoption is data security and privacy concerns, the second biggest challenge (28 percent) is budgetary constraints.
A majority (64 percent) say they plan to purchase tools in the next year to help with Azure migration and management. In addition, 57 percent say they plan to purchase cloud analysis and optimization tools and 56 percent will buy cloud monitoring tools.
The ability to interconnect Azure with other Microsoft products such as Office 365 and Enterprise Mobility Suite is extremely important for 79 percent of respondents.
You can see more of the results in the infographic below.
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