What CDW’s Recognition as an Azure Expert MSP Means to Customers

We are all about serving our customers. That is the heritage of CDW. In fact, CDW has been a Gold level Microsoft partner for more than 10 years, holding several core competencies. We have conducted thousands of Azure services engagements for our customers and have been helping them achieve their technical outcomes over that time with more than 200 integrated services specialists that serve within our Software organization.

CDW has what we call our “Circle of Service” that defines everything that we do and is at the core of what drives us to continue to be relevant and innovate in everything that we do. Our customers demand it of us, and so we demand it of ourselves.

We recently achieved a great honor with our partner, Microsoft, earning the Azure Expert MSP certification. This achievement is connected to our Circle of Service mentality as we continue to strive to be the best in the industry related to our customers’ needs and our desire to demonstrate it to them in everything that we do.

Discover how CDW can assist you with your Azure needs.

Becoming an Azure Expert MSP required a companywide effort spanning multiple teams, bringing together expertise from across our global organization. We worked extremely hard to demonstrate to an independent third party that our experience in these solutions is best in class and that we provide our customers with consistency in process, tools, skills and technology to ensure successful delivery of repeatable, complex solutions based on Microsoft Azure.

What Does It Mean to Achieve the Azure Expert MSP Status?

Partners such as CDW that have achieved this honor have demonstrated the highest level of knowledge, skill, services capabilities and focus on customer service at a global level to differentiate them from other providers.

This is what Microsoft has to say: “When you see the Azure Expert MSP logo, you can be confident that you are connecting with one of our most capable and high-fidelity Azure Managed Service Providers. Whether you are working on mission-critical apps, entire datacenter footprints, or hybrid environments, Azure Expert MSPs have proven their capabilities to be able to help you.”

We are proud of that and wear it as a badge of honor, but it is also a reminder of what is expected of us as we work with our customers to demonstrate this every day.

This isn’t a one-time achievement either. We will need to renew this annually and you can be sure that we will work hard to retain this badge of honor now and into the future.

CDW Amplified™ Azure Managed Services: How We Help Our Customers

We start with the end goal in mind. This means ensuring that our customers have a vision of what they want to accomplish and a plan to manage their environment continuously over the long term.

CDW Amplified™ Azure Managed Services form the basis of that by providing the platform and capability for long-term success, and are a core part of ensuring the long-term success for our customers.

Our global Network Operations Centers are there to assist you throughout your journey and our team of engineers and specialists will ensure we align the right team to your project, helping you with your immediate needs as well as being there with you as you progress in your cloud journey.

Once we understand where you are in your journey, have defined a roadmap and plan for long-term management, we come back with recommendations leveraging proven patterns and approaches to solve for your needs. This may include helping you from the early stages of establishing your foundation in Azure as a platform all the way through accelerating and optimizing your applications and data for marketplace digital velocity.

Working with you to leverage the 4,000-plus features in Azure for your unique needs requires a process. It requires an approach that ensures everything is considered.

Let’s dig into the detail of our three-step approach:

1. Establish the Foundation

Are you looking to establish your Azure tenant, determine the best way to procure and pay for it over time, build a plan and gain valuable experience and skill as quickly as possible?

Then this is where we begin. CDW services are designed to help you every step of the way. The first step is assessing your on-premises environment to determine the right targets and workloads for the public cloud. Our tools, reports and consultants will get this done as quickly as possible to determine the costs involved so you can make decisions on the next steps with the right data and information at hand.

From there CDW can work with you to establish a governance strategy. It’s important to have a plan with policies in place prior to migrating your first workloads. This will ensure you control costs and have the right administration and security postures for success.

Then, through our pilot or Jumpstart services, you can quickly enable your first workloads to skill up quickly, learn the ropes from experts (such as our consultants) and ensure you are ready for your first enterprise level migrations.

Once you are ready, our migration strategy services will ensure we can put all the pieces together for you to develop a plan for your first large-scale migration.

2. Migrate and Grow

This is where the rubber hits the road at scale. Once you’ve established your foundation, and you’ve got your governance strategy and the experience to expand your flexibility and reach, our migration services will help you achieve more at scale.

Our consultants will help you again by assessing your environment and approach. This is a checkpoint, as you may already have done an earlier assessment as we discussed in the previous phase. This may be a new environment, it may be to assess additional on-premises workloads, or tenant-to-tenant cloud scenarios.

Based on our experience, the Migrate and Grow engagement includes the necessary phases to deliver a successful migration of your identified and selected workloads to Azure, and there are several phases to a migration that we may use to minimize disruption and accelerate your deployment.

Those phases are:

• Planning and Discovery: This phase includes an in-depth discovery of technical and business requirements as well as determining and gathering your unique success factors.
• Server and Application Assessment: During this phase, we will identify application dependencies and requirements.
• Migration Plan: Using the prior phase information, we will work with you to create a detailed plan for the migration of resources and sequence over time.
• Landing Zone: This phase is focused on building out the Azure environment to support migration plan, such as network, storage, compute, identity and monitoring. You may already have pieces of this in place, in which case we will review and leverage.
• Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) Migration: This is when the migration occurs. CDW will create an accelerated process to migrate resources to Azure and ensure functionality. We will also ensure a successful outcome based on our experience.
• Tenant-to-Tenant Migration: In the case of cloud-to-cloud migrations, this phase would include migration of a source tenant or subscription to a new target.

This comprehensive approach will ensure a successful outcome aligned to your migration success factors.

3. Accelerate and Optimize

This is when you really fly! We’ve all been hearing about digital transformation for the last number of years. Now is the time to make that into your reality. Our Accelerate and Optimize phase is about doing just that. CDW will work with you on a custom approach to accelerate your digital velocity through automated infrastructure, practical DevOps and modern software architecture patterns and practices.

We will work with you to understand your business need and define a solution using the power of the cloud with modern practices, ensuring true transformation that will help you save money and create a differentiator for you.

Closing Thoughts

CDW has achieved the Azure Expert MSP certification and we are proud of it. You can trust this badge of honor, our experience and the approaches in capability laid out in this post to ensure your Azure and cloud success.

We are excited to work with you. You can get more information through your CDW account manager, ask about our Azure cloud journey and engage with our specialists to help you. We will meet you where you are, look for quick results as well as establish a plan with you for long-term success.