Services

Microsoft Azure

At Doherty Associates, we have the skills and experience to untap the potential of Microsoft Azure, to ensure it delivers maximum value to your business.

The Azure platform offers over 200 services that can be provisioned to deliver applications on a per-second basis. But while this brings a wealth of opportunity, it also involves a measure of complexity – which our expertise can cut right through.

We know that successful deployment typically requires multiple services with many configuration settings, and that the data held on these applications may be confidential, sensitive, or subject to regulation. Security is therefore fundamental. But a successful Azure deployment must also function well, and our experience and best-practice knowledge give us stand-out advantage in achieving these complementary goals.

We’ll pull out all the stops to ensure that your data is protected and that your systems are following best-practice architectures. We will also do whatever we can to find and implement potential improvements and to detect and resolve any security risks before they can grow into problems.

If you think our proactive approach might suit you, please contact us.

• Design and architecture

  Our team of certified Azure Solution Architect Experts has extensive experience in building new Azure environments and of keeping them secure and up to date.

  When a client is moving to the cloud, we start by developing a comprehensive understanding of any existing legacy environments, which we then factor into the design.

  For those with existing Azure environments, we thoroughly investigate the existing design to ensure it has the right capabilities to deliver maximum value to the business.

  As the Azure platform is constantly evolving, we continually invest in skilling up our staff to ensure that they are familiar with and understand any new capabilities. Many now have Azure certification in specific areas such as networking and security, so you’ll find strong seams of expertise running through every level of our team.

• Landing zone design and build

  If you are in the initial stages of creating an Azure environment, we can design and build a landing zone with the right set of policies and controls in place to ensure that the environment you migrate into is ‘live’ and ready for use.

  This work can be undertaken on a project basis or as part of a wider cloud migration.

  In line with Microsoft’s aspirations for Azure, our aim is to help our clients operate successful cloud environments that drive their business while maintaining best practices for security and governance.

• Cloud migration

  If you are looking for an edge when adopting Azure, our extensive history of migrating systems and applications to the cloud, coupled with our experience of hosting and maintaining customer environments, make us a sound choice.

  We always begin with a process of understanding both the technical and business impacts of migrating. This puts us in a stronger position to help you achieve your business goals – whether this is reducing costs, enhancing reliability, or unlocking new capabilities.

  Some systems can be migrated to the cloud ‘as-is’ and we have tried and tested processes for pulling these systems into Azure and getting them up and running seamlessly. Other systems may need to be re-architected to work well in Azure – or can be made to work better using Azure services. For example, Azure may allow some services to work across geographies for better resilience, or for solutions to be created using cloud-native technologies such as serverless computing.

  We can also consult on new cloud-native applications and the use of DevOps methods to speed up application delivery.

• Training and enablement

  We can provide user and administrator training across the Azure technology stack, with additional support from expert consultants when needed.

  For the majority of businesses, the most important factor in moving to the cloud isn’t the actual migration; it’s the ability to extract maximum benefit from their investment.

  Training is a key part of getting to grips with the technology. We can work closely with you to support change management and to ensure that everyone understands the new system, is able to adopt it, and can benefit from the advantages it brings.

• Managed Azure services

  Once your environment is set up in Azure, we can help to ensure that the systems and services inside it are running well, that your data is protected from attack, and that your business achieves the benefits of scaling appropriately.

  As cost control is a key aspect of managing Azure environments, we’ll make sure you are using the right products and that they are sized correctly for the work you are doing. These can then be scaled up and down appropriately in relation to application usage.

  We monitor performance and capacity, with actionable alerts that can be directed to our Service Desk or your own in-house department for incident response. And we ensure that automations and data pipelines are running successfully.

  We also use our own tooling to pull together ‘raw’ data from multiple places across the Microsoft Azure platform, to interpret that information and then distil it in the form of useful insights or concrete recommendations to help you manage your cloud environment more securely and more efficiently.

  These tasks can be outsourced to us in their entirety and delivered as a fully managed service. Alternatively, we can work alongside your in-house IT teams, or empower you to monitor and manage your workloads for yourself.

  Just let us know how we can help – or ask for our recommendations.

• Azure security and networking

  By successfully integrating Azure into our wider security management services, we make sure that your total security surface is covered.

  As Azure has developed, the networking and security elements have grown in capability and sophistication to accommodate various application needs and to mitigate emerging threats. These new capabilities may be supplied directly by Microsoft as part of the platform, or through first-party firewalls and network resources. This means your application designs must take networking into account. And once deployed, your security monitoring and response on Azure must also be on point.

  Our monitoring service includes service health, backup, and security monitoring as standard, with actionable alerts that can be directed to our Service Desk or your own in-house department for incident response. You can than choose to add more advanced features such as disaster recovery monitoring, traffic analytics, and inventory capabilities. And then step it up again to include real-time threat monitoring if that’s what you need.

  Our management service applies the Microsoft-recommended level of security compliance and remediation, and closely aligns with improving Azure Secure Scores. It includes cost management, resource and location compliance, a comprehensive tagging system and start-up/shutdown schedules for virtual machines. You can than choose to add higher levels of security and regulatory compliance if required.

  Just talk to us about your needs and we’ll take it from there.

• Modern data warehouse

  We can help you create, run, and maintain a modern data warehouse in Azure, enabling you to access the right information at the right time to inform your decision-making, and to run your businesses even more effectively.

  The systems used by many businesses in their day-to-day operations are now capable of producing large amounts of raw data. But before this can be useful, it must be turned into actionable information.

  Traditionally, this data engineering was extremely expensive as the process required significant ongoing maintenance to remain effective. However, all that has changed thanks to modern data warehouse architecture enabled by the cloud. This allows for smaller sets of data to be stored in a raw format and only processed when needed. This massively decreases the ongoing running and maintenance costs, while also allowing for data to be used in different ways in the future.

  In competitive markets where knowledge is power, being able to unlock valuable information from your data can be especially useful. And we’re happy to help.