If your organisation is making the move to the cloud and considering using Microsoft Azure or M365, it can be daunting to know where to start. If you don’t have the right skills in-house then perhaps engaging a cloud consultant is a good way forward. But you might be wondering where to start, who to ask and how to make sure you get a return on your investment? Read on to find out how to engage a cloud consultant, what to use them for and how to ensure success.
What can a Microsoft Cloud Consultant help me with?
If you are considering a move from on-premise applications to running everything in the Cloud (eg. Microsoft Azure) then a consultant can help with providing a high-level strategic overview and give advice and guidance on how to proceed. A consultant might be the answer if you are needing help with a wide range of business challenges such as:
- Should we move our business solution(s) from on-premise to Cloud, and if so how should we go about it?
- We are looking to extract insights, business value and reporting to help with better decision making, but how do we access this data that is held in disparate places?
- We are opening a new office abroad – how can we best provide IT services in this new location?
- We want to provide our in-house sales or technical team with AI-powered agents that can answer questions based on our own created and curated content but we aren’t sure where to start?
Maybe you have a more nitty-gritty technical question or challenge that’s been troubling you, or you’re just looking for advice based on what works well for other customers of your size or in your industry sector?
Choosing the right Cloud Consultant
If you’ve decided that some external consultancy support might help with your business challenge – how do you go about selecting the right consultant for the project?
Here are some things you consider:
- Does the consultant / consultancy have specialist expertise in the cloud area you are considering (eg Azure and M365)?
- How many years’ of experience do they have in their specialist area?
- Do they have evidence of numerous happy customers?
- Can they showcase cloud projects that they have delivered?
- Do they have the appropriate level of certification or specifically in the case of Microsoft – Solution Partner Designations?
- Can they evidence their skills with blog posts and case studies around their expertise on their website?
Next Steps
Once you have evaluated the cloud consultants and narrowed down to a shortlist or selected consultant, you should agree a clear brief for the project including timescales, outcomes and budget.
Why choose Compete366 as your Microsoft Azure cloud consultant?
Established in 2014, Compete366 has more than 10 years experience in cloud consultancy, and specialises in Azure and M365 (we are a designated Microsoft Solution Partner for Azure Data and AI, Azure Infrastructure and Virtual Desktop, and Microsoft Modern Work)
Over the last 10 years we have delivered hundreds of cloud projects and now have over 300 satisfied customers. We regularly publish case studies and blog posts to share our expertise and guidance.
We offer a free no obligation call with one of our cloud consultants on any topic, just contact us with a brief explanation of your requirements. On the call and the follow up email we will provide we will either answer your question or give you advice on how to proceed. /you have nothing to lose in having this call – it’s our chance to prove our expertise and value, and gives you the chance to receive some free expert advice and guidance
What Next?
If you’d like to discuss how how one of our Cloud Consultants can help, get in touch to book your initial free of charge call.
Following that initial you have two options for next steps:
Option 1
Buy or transfer your M365 / Azure subscriptions to us and get free ongoing expert advice and guidance. This service covers everything in M365 / Azure, so for example:
- M365 – configuring SharePoint, Conditional Access Policies, Teams Phone, Intune, PowerBI, M365 Copilot etc
- Azure – Fabric, Azure AI Foundry, Copilot Studio, Azure Kubernetes service, Azure App Service, Azure SQL Database, Azure Virtual Machines, Are Files etc
- Call us anytime that you want to discuss anything M365 or Azure related such as:
- How do I do this?
- I’m trying to achieve X what options do I have for doing this?
- How do I cost optimise Y?
- How do I secure Z?
- I need to scale this up to VV?
- You will also have a scheduled monthly call with your assigned Cloud consultant and an Annual review of environment
Option 2
Ask us to deliver a project for you on a paid for consultancy basis. When we deliver a project (this could be a migration or implementation project) we always include documentation of what we’ve done and a handover session with the in-house IT team that will then take over the ongoing management of the new environment.
One final thing
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Contact our Microsoft specialists
Phone or email us to find out more – or book a free, no-obligation call with our technical consultants using the contact form.
“It’s great to work with the Compete366 team, the team members are really knowledgeable, helpful and responsive. No question is too difficult for them. They have really helped us to manage our Azure costs and ensure we have the right environment. When we bring a new customer on-board we can scale up immediately via the Azure portal and quickly make environments available to our customers.”
“We also find that there’s never a heavy sales pitch from them – they are technically focused and recommend what’s right for us.”
“We had great support from the Compete366 AVD expert, who was really helpful, and guided me through options to tackle issues that arose.”
“The great thing about our AVD set up is that we have a custom set up for each project which Compete366 showed me how to do. And with the scalability and flexibility of AVD – we can meet clients’ expectations and get project users up and running more quickly.”
“We were immediately impressed with the advice that the Compete366 specialists in Azure Architecture were able to provide. This was all new to us and we really needed some external expertise that we could use to get our questions answered. The beauty of working with Compete366 is that we transferred our Azure consumption to them, and at the same time received all of their advice and guidance free of charge.”
“Working with Compete366 has been like extending our own team – they are extremely and easy to work with. Right from the outset, it was clear what was on offer – everything was presented to us in a straightforward and uncomplicated way. They also provided just the right level of challenge to our developers and saved us time and money by suggesting better ways to implement our infrastructure.”
“Compete366 were able to help us leverage some useful contacts in Microsoft. We really value the expert advice and guidance that they have offered us in setting up a highly scalable infrastructure. We are also setting in place a regular monthly meeting which will allow us to further refine our architecture and ensure we keep on track as our requirements grow and change.”
“I have been delighted with the migration, where my team worked very hard, supported by expert advice from Compete366, and achieved everything in the timescale we had set out. Compete 366 made sure that we didn’t make any expensive mistakes, and guided us through the process”
