4 Ways to Pitch Azure to Your SMB Customers

Azure is Microsoft’s cloud computing platform, providing a wide variety of services that your customers can use without purchasing and provisioning their own expensive hardware. But how can you as a cloud reseller pitch Azure to your SMBs to get adoption amongst your customers and make the public cloud a viable, repeatable and scalable revenue stream for your business?

Azure is at the forefront of the public cloud revolution – be part of it!

Adoption of public cloud is growing fast. According to Gartner, the worldwide public cloud services market is projected to grow 21.4 percent in 2018 to total $186.4 billion, up from $153.5 billion in 2017.  The fastest-growing segment of the market is cloud system infrastructure services (IaaS) which is forecast to grow 35.9 percent in 2018 to reach $40.8 billion.

Not only is cloud computing growing rapidly, SMBs are (and pretty much always have been) at the forefront of cloud adoption. Giacom offers a range of popular options for software resellers and they’re all cloud-based – Azure takes this to the next level.

Azure delivers value to the bottom line

Most cloud models are designed to offer economic value through the reduction of operational expenses – naturally costs depend (mostly) on usage, bandwidth and storage, but by implementing Azure, your SMB customers will also save on the upfront costs associated with traditional on-premises hardware and software set ups, not to mention worthwhile savings on overhead costs that come with running physical equipment. Microsoft’s own research last year showed that over 80% of companies who had adopted Azure cloud solutions experienced lower costs alongside increased productivity.

One of the biggest fears that SMBs have when it comes to adopting cloud is the fear of uncontrolled spending. As an Azure reseller, you’re well placed to offer them the reassurance that the pay for what you use model is something to be embraced. Help your customers manage their cloud spending through historic and predictive analytics on their past and expected spend. Using Azure’s advanced billing management means you’re able to give your customers a simplified view into cloud costs and remove the complexity of budgeting, tracking, forecasting, and invoicing cloud costs.

SMBs need your support – Azure delivers

SMBs will often lack the technical expertise or headcount resource required to efficiently manage their PCs, servers, software, user access, and policies. In our experience, smaller businesses will rarely have a single toolset across the business for implementing robust configuration management. This means that they’ll often carry out changes on live equipment as and when required.

This is an opportunity for resellers offering Azure. At a basic level, your customers will want to know how you’ll back up their data, what happens in the event of downtime, how quickly they’ll be back on their feet and who’s going to take care of routine updates on a daily, weekly and monthly basis.

With Azure, you can provide the core management services your customers need – automation, patching updates, configuration management, backup and disaster recovery, and identity management are all areas where you can add value.

Azure Protects

When viewed through an SMB lens, the current security picture for businesses looks increasingly complex. Every week we learn of additional threats in the cloud space – and with every passing year, more challenging compliance and legislative requirements are needed. Regardless of cloud adoption, SMBs have a tough time keeping data, workloads, and users secure. Azure can be your benchmark, enabling you to offer security as a managed service and eliminating the need for SMBs to cope with patching, malware threats, and intrusion detection alone.

As you’d expect from an organisation that has built and managed some of the world’s largest online services, Microsoft has ensured that the security technologies baked into Azure are second to none –the Azure infrastructure is highly resilient to attack, safeguards user access to the Azure environment, and helps keep customer data secure through encrypted communications, as well as threat management and mitigation practices. Azure Security Center, the Operations Management Suite and Advanced Threat Analytics put security front and centre of the Azure infrastructure.

We hope these four ways help you pitch Azure to your SMB customers.