Azure Managed Services

What Azure cloud management covers

Azure cloud management is the design and day-to-day operation of everything in your Microsoft tenant below the application: management groups and subscriptions, Entra ID and role assignments, virtual networks and connectivity, compute (VMs, Virtual Machine Scale Sets, AKS, App Service, Functions), data services (Azure SQL, Cosmos DB, Storage), security tooling (Defender for Cloud, Sentinel, Key Vault), monitoring, backup and cost.

We take on estates at any stage: a greenfield tenant that needs a landing zone, an existing estate built by hand that needs bringing under control, or a hybrid environment with Windows Server and Active Directory on-premises that is extending into Azure. Most of our Azure clients are Microsoft-first organisations with Microsoft 365, and the same identity plane is used for both.

Everything we deploy is described in Terraform (or Bicep where a client's team prefers it), changed through pull requests, with the repository owned by you.

Landing zone, governance and identity

We build to the Azure Landing Zone reference: a management group hierarchy that separates platform from workloads, subscriptions per environment and workload class, Azure Policy assignments that enforce tagging, allowed regions, encryption and diagnostic settings, and centralised logging into a Log Analytics workspace in a management subscription.

Identity follows least privilege: Entra ID groups mapped to RBAC roles at the right scope, Privileged Identity Management for just-in-time elevation, Conditional Access requiring MFA and compliant devices for administrators, managed identities for workloads instead of stored secrets, and quarterly access reviews with a record.

Networking and hybrid connectivity

Hub-and-spoke virtual networks with Azure Firewall or a partner NVA in the hub, private endpoints for PaaS services so storage and databases never have public endpoints, Azure Bastion for administrative access, and DDoS protection on internet-facing addresses. Site-to-site VPN for smaller sites; ExpressRoute where bandwidth or latency justify it, with Azure Virtual WAN for multi-region or many-branch estates.

Hybrid identity and DNS are designed alongside the network: Entra Connect or cloud sync, Azure AD DS or domain controllers in Azure where legacy applications need Kerberos, and private DNS zones linked to every spoke.

Compute, Kubernetes and platform operations

Virtual machines are managed like any server estate: monthly patching through Azure Update Manager with rings and snapshots, CIS-aligned hardening for Windows Server and Linux, Azure Backup with tested restores, and right-sizing against real utilisation. Scale sets and App Service are configured for zone redundancy where the SLA requires it.

AKS clusters are run with node pools on the right VM families, cluster autoscaler, Azure CNI, workload identity, Defender for Containers, and GitOps deployment through Flux or Argo CD. Cluster upgrades follow the AKS release calendar so clusters never fall out of support. Our Windows Server and Linux management teams handle the OS layer with the same reporting.

Security and compliance on Azure

Defender for Cloud is enabled with the plans that match the workload, secure score is tracked monthly with owners for each recommendation, and Sentinel or a client's existing SIEM receives the audit and security logs. Key Vault holds every certificate and secret, with rotation. Azure Policy prevents non-compliant deployments rather than reporting them afterwards.

The evidence for ISO 27001, SOC 2, PCI DSS, Cyber Essentials, GDPR and regional frameworks comes from the way the estate is run: policy compliance reports, access reviews, patch reports, backup restore tests and change history. Certification and audit engagements are delivered by our sister firm PraxisQ Consulting.

Azure monitoring and 24/7 NOC

Azure Monitor, Log Analytics and Application Insights provide the platform metrics and logs; alert rules and action groups route into our NOC, where an engineer acknowledges high-severity alerts within 15 minutes around the clock. For hybrid estates a Zabbix proxy in Azure joins on-premises and Azure resources on one board.

Standard alert coverage includes VM availability and resource pressure, disk forecast, backup job failures, Azure SQL DTU or vCore saturation and long-running queries, AKS node and pod health, App Service response time and 5xx rate, ExpressRoute and VPN tunnel state, Key Vault certificate expiry and service health advisories for your regions.

Azure cost management

Cost is reviewed monthly with the report: rightsizing from Azure Advisor and our own utilisation data, reserved instances and savings plans where usage is steady, Azure Hybrid Benefit applied to every eligible Windows and SQL licence, dev and test environments scheduled off out of hours, storage tiering and lifecycle policies, and orphaned disks, IPs and snapshots removed.

Budgets and anomaly alerts are set per subscription so a runaway workload is caught in days, not at invoice time. Hybrid Benefit alone is often the largest single saving for Microsoft-licensed estates and is frequently unapplied when we arrive.

Migration to Azure

Migrations from on-premises VMware or Hyper-V use Azure Migrate for discovery and dependency mapping, with a per-application decision to rehost, replatform onto PaaS (Azure SQL Managed Instance, App Service) or retire. Database Migration Service and Azure Site Recovery keep cut-over windows short and rehearsed. Windows Server and SQL Server workloads are the common case and where Hybrid Benefit and Extended Security Updates matter most.

Engagement models and pricing

Managed Azure services are priced monthly based on estate size and support tier; production tiers include 24/7 NOC cover and the monthly operations and cost review. Landing zone and migration projects are fixed-scope. Contracts are monthly rolling after the first quarter. We can operate under your CSP agreement or provide Azure through ours.

Clients are supported across the UK, US, Australia, UAE, Singapore, Canada and India from Mohali, with engineers on rotation across those time zones. The same team manages AWS and GCP estates, so multi-cloud organisations get one provider and one report.