Over the last few weeks in the series, Terry and I have provided a lot of resources for you to start to build your practice. It is our hope that you are bookmarking these posts to reference later. You may start to feel overwhelmed or you may have already been overwhelmed with Azure in general. Initially, everyone goes through that process, heck I even go through that process it seems daily. So how do I keep my sanity, in one word:
FOCUS!
I do not think there really is anyone who knows and sells all the aspects of Azure, successful partners look at what they do well today and apply it to one of the many Azure offerings. They understand one very important tenant about Azure and that is:
This is an AND conversation not an OR one.
What does that mean, quite simply when you take at look at what practices you do well today, think about how you can add Azure to it. For example:
- We do great work SQL on premises, AND how can we extend the database to Azure SQL services.
- We do great work with Identity today AND how can leverage Azure Active Directory to make it better
- We do great work today with VMware AND how can we leverage Azure Site Recovery to make it better
So as you can see, you do not have to know all of Azure, you have to know which parts of Azure fit your business and managed services. Then with a little focus you can start building out an Azure practice to compliment what you already do today. One practice I hope everyone is doing for your customers is business continuity (aka backup, disaster recovery,..etc)! Business continuity is truly the long hanging fruit to get started in Azure and building your practice!
In particular when it comes to leveraging Azure to protect data is that you get an offsite disaster recovery environment. Additionally Azure can be both a backup and recovery target. When you look at Azure there are three distinct solutions that can all work together to provide your customers some great capabilities to protect their business and data.
All three of the services can provide a blended solution for you and your customers. In our next post we will take a look at Azure backup.
Make sure to check out the full series and keep up to date with our posts here: https://aka.ms/buildyourazurepractice
Matt Hester
Sr. Partner Technology Strategist
Microsoft SMB&D