There are numerous advantages to becoming an Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP). This prestigious designation is an endorsement from Microsoft that your company is one of the most capable and high-fidelity Azure MSPs – and that’s a coveted differentiator.

Companies that achieve Azure Expert MSP status can expect accelerated revenue growth, the creation of new revenue streams, and first-class access to Microsoft co-sell engagements and MSP business support.

Businesses want partners that they can count on as Managed Service Providers (MSPs), which have a lot to deliver.

Agree with this or not, certifications are a key indicator that MSPs are invested in their customer’s success. For MSPs offering cloud management on Microsoft Azure, Expert MSP Certification is a critical avenue to drive revenue.

One key aspect of certification is the tooling provided to customers by their MSP. Customer portals not only need to feel intuitive and easy to use, but they also need to offer a variety of practical capabilities.

A common misconception is that all cloud users must or should use the native cloud provider portals.

For MSPs with fully managed offerings, this is not the case and customer’s users need an interface that supports them in understanding and acting on their cloud accounts.

The right tool has a lot to deliver on:

• Spend visibility: real-time visibility of spend, not having to wait until they receive an end-of-month invoice
• Cost forecasting: based on usage trends and not just at the account level; for example, breakdowns and groupings at the account, region, resource type levels, etc.
• Budget alerting: the ability to set budget limits that are monitored, for both actual and forecast spend, and alerted against, direct to users via email and mobile apps or text
• Provisioning, including governance: providing the ability to self-serve the provisioning of new resources, supported by policies that control who can provision what and how.
• Operational management: view resource details and take day-to-day actions against them, from simple on/off schedules to remote code execution
• Cost savings: continually updated opportunities for cost savings that are easy to both understand and act on, across a variety of common resource types
• Compliance monitoring: checking against industry-recognized standards like Center for Internet Security, from cloud account to resource levels

Platforms like ServiceNow provide these through proven track records and enable partners like Kumoco to bring world-class cloud management capabilities to the table.

Underlying capabilities like workflow processes, automation, and orchestration are provided by enterprise platforms.

With the right tooling, customer interactions are more efficient and effective — and that is an important consideration when looking at passing an audit for being an Azure Expert MSP.

The auditing process can take months to complete and requires expertise from across your organization. An effective and comprehensive cloud management platform is a critical component of a capable toolset (CMP).

Ready to go, out-of-the-box capabilities offered by the cloud management expertise of Kumoco Cloud Manager on ServiceNow act as accelerators to meeting audit requirements, shifting expectations of year-long implementation timelines to as little as six weeks.

With ServiceNow partners, you can count on to bring effective tooling. You can accelerate revenue growth through the opportunities provided by Microsoft Azure Expert MSP Certification.