Azure Health Check Service

The Azure Health Check helps our clients make the most of their investment in Microsoft Azure and reviews their existing Azure infrastructure to ensure that it leverages the five pillars of a well architected Azure Framework. ​​​​​​​

This page gives you an overview of the service and the key information you need to sell it. The service is a value-add that needs to be pitched by listening to the customer and highlighting the most appropriate benefits. It is a fixed cost service that you can quote directly.

An Azure Health Check is a great starting point and can open up additional sales and service opportunities.

Sales Tips & Conversations

Before you start: 

  1. Knowing your client’s business, commercial and technical objectives, plus their current situation, is key. If you know your client you can position the service effectively
  2. Taking a benefit-led approach is more effective than starting with features or jumping straight into the technically specifications.
  3. This is a fixed price service. It's a line item you’re able to provide a direct quote for which keeps things simple.
  4. Sell it on the confidence it gives and security it provides, not the cost savings. Saving money is secondary benefit.

Things you should know about your client: 

  1. What does the business do.
  2. Who are their customers - names are great but industry will do.
  3. Do those customers have specific expectations - e.g. if their customers are in a regulated market such as finance or healthcare, compliance is critical. If your client (or their customers) is a well-known brand their reputation and therefore security is vital. The service helps both and will help to pick out any flaws or issues in existing infrastructure.
  4. Do they make any claims about uptime, security or resilience? If so, ask how they adhere to them.
  5. What growth stage is the business at? If they're growing, they may want their dev team focused on their product not their infrastructure but the health check is a great foot in the door to open a conversation around the further services if issues are identified. If it's a mature business, they may have customer SLAs or additional compliance requirements. This service helps in both scenarios. ​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Questions you can use to start the conversation: 

  • How often do you review your Azure environment? ​​​​​​​
  • Do you have to adhere to SLAs for your customers?
  • What compliance standards do you have to meet for your customers? ​​​​​​​

Information you need to gather*:

  1. Number of Azure Subscriptions to be checked?  (Maximum of 10 for Std AHC)
  2. Number of Azure AD Tenants that subscriptions are spread across? (Maximum of 4 for Std AHC)
  3. Total Number of Azure Resources per Subscription?
  4. Total Number of Azure Resources across all subscriptions and tenants that are to be checked? (Maximum of 2000 across all of above).
  5. Where is the Azure infrastructure?  CSP via Grey Matter? MS PAYG, EA or CSP via another partner?
  6. If not through GM we must be granted temporary contributor rights to the subscription to perform the health check.  Please confirm this is possible. We will supply details on how to do this.

Please note: The price may not increase from £2,495, but CGS may need to allocate more time which is why it needs to be scoped if above these numbers.

*These are the prerequisites needed to submit a ticket. The answers also need to be added to CRM/IFS notes on all AHC orders.

Target Audience - companies and people

Companies to target:

  • Prospects/Clients in regulated markets as compliance is critical. The cost of non-compliance is far greater than the cost of becoming compliant.
  • Businesses that have SLAs with their customers that are dependent on robust infrastructure.
  • Emerging businesses with fledgling infrastructure that have implemented - the Health Check will identify if they have done it correctly.

People:

  1. Mid- to Senior commercial decisions makers that need to ensure their infrastructure can support business efficiency and growth.
  2. Mid- to Senior technical decision makers that may not have the skills or time to check the details of their Azure set up.

It is ideal for any business that has asked:

  • Is my current implementation correct for my current requirements?
  • Is my current estate suitable for scaling in the future?
  • Am I secure?
  • Am I able to recover from a disaster?
  • Are there efficiencies I'm not aware of that can help lower costs?

Service summaries

You can use the following service descriptions when discussing the service with your customers. There's an email you can use here but only send this once you've spoken to your customer and know their challenges.

Short:

Our Azure Health Check Service reviews your Azure infrastructure to ensure it leverages the five pillars of a well-architected Azure Framework and will improve reliability, security, cost-optimisation, operational excellence, and performance efficiency.

Long:

Our Azure Health Check Service reviews your Azure infrastructure to ensure it leverages the five pillars of a well-architected Azure Framework and will improve reliability, security, cost-optimisation, operational excellence, and performance efficiency.

Our in-house Microsoft-certified Azure Administrators follow a tried and tested process to give you a full breakdown of issues and the recommended fixes. As with everything we do, we blend best-practice with real-world experience and factor in both your commercial and technical objectives.

Azure health checks should be performed every six months on a standard Azure estate. This is particularly the case after self-migration of resources to Azure, after creating or changing your Azure environment, and before signing any compliance agreements.

What are the Five Pillars of a Well-Architected Framework?

The five pillars of a well-architected Azure Framework are:

  • Reliability
  • Security
  • Cost-Optimisation
  • Operational Excellence
  • Performance Efficiency

The Azure Health Check exists to ensure that a client's existing infrastructure leverages these five pillars.

The benefits: If a client fully leverages these five pillars, they will...

  • Reduce potential downtime and issues
  • Verify scalability and reliability, including failover and/or disaster recovery settings
  • Verify the infrastructure security configurations against regulatory compliance recommendations
  • Optimise their Azure consumption costs and overall performance

Features and Benefits


Features

The Azure Health Check is a review and analysis of a client's existing Azure infrastructure. The service consists of:

  1. Review and understand the existing deployment and planned platform usage, including growth aspirations and potential cost savings:
    1. Perform resource, platform and dependency audit
    2. Discover resource usage, sizing and current capacity
    3. Review availability, scaling, automation and resiliency features usage against what is required
    4. Analyse the Security status of the estate
    5. Review the status of the FailoverFallback and BackupRestore implementation
    6. Identify areas where value can be increased, costs can be saved, while maintaining or improving the quality of service
  2. Comprehensive report detailing the results and improvement plan against each of the key areas - best practice, security, resource and platform recommendations
  3. Azure certified architect debrief, reviewing report results and recommendations
  4. Option of on-going consultancy to implement recommendations and remediate issues.


The Benefits 

  • Maximise performance: We'll ensure every aspect of your Azure infrastructure is ready for maximum performance.
  • Proven security: Test and verify your infrastructure security configurations against regulatory compliance recommendations.
  • Ready for anything: Verify scalability and reliability, including failover and/or disaster recovery settings.
  • Protect your reputation: Minimise downtime and the knock-on effects to employees and customers.
  • Optimise costs: If we can find a way of reducing your spend whilst meeting your performance criteria, we will.  ​​​​​​​
  • Understand the next steps: You'll receive a comprehensive report with recommendations and remediation steps.

Service Levels & Pricing

Cost

  • Standard Health Check, fixed price, £2,495 + VAT
  • Criteria for standard pricing:
    • Up to 10 subscriptions AND/OR a maximum of 4 tenants
    • AND/OR a maximum of 2000 resources across the above.
  • N.b we credit back up to 50% of the cost of your Health Check if we are unable to realise cost savings or security improvements on your infrastructure

Time

  • Standard lead time from order to delivery is 4 weeks on average

Health Check Report Example

The report provides an overview of a clients current Azure standing. Headline topics include the following:

  • Customer Information
  • Engineer Information
  • Project Information
  • Glossary and Definition
  • What does a health check cover?
  • Customer Specifics/Concerns
  • Executive Summary
  • Details of Findings
  • Summary

Process and Checklist

  1. AM identifies opportunity and sends quote to client. It does not need to be scoped by CGS, BUT you do need to have the pre-requisite questions (below) answered unless it is outside of the standard criteria.
  2. When sale is confirmed, submit a ticket in the standard way along with answers to the following pre-requisite questions*:
    1. Number of Azure Subscriptions to be checked?  (Maximum of 10 for Std AHC)
    2. Number of Azure AD Tenants that subscriptions are spread across? (Maximum of 4 for Std AHC)
    3. Total Number of Azure Resources per Subscription?
    4. Total Number of Azure Resources across all subscriptions and tenants that are to be checked? (Maximum of 2000 across all of above).
    5. Where is the Azure infrastructure?  CSP via Grey Matter? MS PAYG, EA or CSP via another partner?
    6. If not through GM we must be granted temporary contributor rights to the subscription to perform the health check.  Please confirm this is possible. We will supply details on how to do this.
  3. PO Comes in through the purchasing system to CGS
  4. CGS check availability, assigns engineer and books in healthcheck - Expect approx. 4-week lead time
  5. Engineer books 30 min tech call with customer to introduce and to see if any areas need bespoke review, what’s important etc.
  6. If infrastructure not on our CSP then we will need Access granted – Engineer will send details to client
  7. Engineer sends boilerplate SOW + any customisation requested above
  8. SOW must be signed and returned at least 5 working dates prior to project start date
  9. Engineer starts project on agreed date
  10. Engineer finishes Project
  11. Engineer notifies client that any permission granted can be revoked
  12. Engineer sends report to client
  13. Engineer books follow up call to explain/discuss report usually a few days to a week later giving the client time to digest first
  14. Project complete

Please note: The price may not increase from £2,495, but CGS may need to allocate more time which is why it needs to be scoped if above these numbers.
*These are the prerequisites needed to submit a ticket. The answers also need to be added to CRM/IFS notes on all AHC orders.

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