Get Help Managing Your Microsoft Azure Cloud Environment

Small and medium-sized businesses and large enterprises face several challenges when they want to move to the public cloud. First, they must decide which applications and data to migrate, then they need the staff, budget and expertise to carry out the vision. And once in the cloud, they must ensure good performance and cost-effectiveness, and that the workloads are secure.

It's not easy. In fact, according to Flexera’s 2024 State of the Cloud Report, organizations’ top three cloud challenges are managing cloud spending (84% of survey respondents), security (81%) and a lack of resources and expertise (78%).

Fortunately, you can turn to CDW’s team of cloud engineers to design and oversee your migration, then you can hire CDW’s managed services to manage the cloud environment, optimize it for best performance and cost-effectiveness, and troubleshoot problems when they arise.

Let me explain how we do it.

CDW’s managed services team for Azure uses multiple tools that continuously monitor the health and performance of our customers’ Azure cloud environments, 24/7.

To do it, CDW’s Enterprise Command Center uses proprietary technology with leading artificial intelligence for IT operations (AIOps), IT infrastructure monitoring software and help desk tools. CDW has built a basic set of event policies but also customizes event policies for each customer.

When the tools identify potential problems, such as network traffic latency or high CPU utilization in Azure virtual machines, they send alerts to CDW’s Enterprise Command Center. Incident tickets are immediately created and routed to the appropriate Azure specialist team to resolve. We remediate high-priority tickets as soon as possible.

Customers can contact CDW’s managed services team at any time via phone, chat or email. They can also track progress on remediation efforts using the CDW Services Portal. Customers who subscribe to the Essential and Premier tiers of managed services also have access to a dedicated CDW technical account manager.

CDW’s managed services for Azure also provides operating system management, which includes patch management, software updates, and fine-tuning and optimizing performance.

For example, when CDW customer Gables Residential recently migrated its VMs and data to Azure, most of its VMs were running on old versions of the Windows Server OS and hadn’t been patched in years. 

First, we patched them to bolster security, then we rebuilt and refactored the VMs to run on the latest OS. Over time, we consolidated some applications into fewer VMs to take advantage of Azure’s more powerful server resources. To reduce costs, we also monitored usage and rightsized compute and storage resources to optimize performance and reduce cloud spending. The result was massive cost savings.

These are just a few of the services that CDW managed services for Azure provides. We also manage disaster recovery and assist with the deployment of new applications.

Our cost management portal allows organizations to track and view graphical reports on cloud consumption. Our cloud security services include penetration tests, vulnerability scans and an incident response readiness assessment.