It depends on the types of SMB. Most probably don't want to own and operate their IT/Application landscape/stack. It's a balance of cost vs service quality vs time-to-market.
You can have someone else manage it that might not be in your local area and then you only need to pay for the hours they spend managing it; much cheaper than an FTE. It can also easily open up your infrastructure to people not in one location while being able to offload the infrastructure cost; it also allows for integration with various SaaS platforms. Lots of reasons for an SMB to use Azure or any cloud platform.
And security improvements since Microsoft handles part of solution security depending on the service used. For example, I don't have to hire some super expensive DBA to manage infrastructure, licensing, and security for our Azure SQL database. That's Microsoft's problem, and they spend several billion bucks a year on cloud security.
I believe you can draw attention when you compare numbers. This could be a good starting point for getting a conversation going. [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/tco/calculator/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/tco/calculator/)
Next to this maybe a Business Premium license for customers. Here you can see what is all in the package and then additionally compare this to what they already have? [https://m365maps.com/matrix.htm#000001000000000000000](https://m365maps.com/matrix.htm#000001000000000000000)
Maybe some good information is stored at the following location: [https://cloudpartners.transform.microsoft.com/partner-gtm/csp/m365-business-premium](https://cloudpartners.transform.microsoft.com/partner-gtm/csp/m365-business-premium)
You're better off speaking to a sales person at MSFT than asking here, as most of us here are technical, not sales.
But all of this completely depends on the business requirements. Azure has always worked best at scale, and out of the 3 major hyperscalers offers the best bang for the buck when it comes to large estates.
But smaller businesses, even solo businesses that need a cloud presence, I would say AWS is more competitive in that field.
But again, depends on the business and what they need, as some solutions Azure offers is better than AWS and vice versa.
Well one advantage over smaller providers like linode or digital ocean- you can power down certain resources and not pay for them (only for the data/disks) if you don’t need them constantly.
Hong from Linode here.
We do still charge for Compute Instances that are powered off are not in use. This is because even while [powered off](https://www.linode.com/community/questions/415/my-linode-is-powered-off-will-it-still-be-considered-for-billing), the virtualization resources remain exclusively reserved for your immediate use and your data is actively preserved on your disk allocations. In order to stop charges on any service, that service will need to be [fully deleted](https://www.linode.com/docs/products/platform/billing/guides/stop-billing/). If you'd like to learn more about our billing practices, I've provided a few guides below:
[https://www.linode.com/docs/products/platform/billing/](https://www.linode.com/docs/products/platform/billing/)
[https://www.linode.com/community/questions/19389/is-linodes-prepaid-or-postpaid](https://www.linode.com/community/questions/19389/is-linodes-prepaid-or-postpaid)
Excuse my bad wording, I meant it the way you explained in detail. Still - I prefer to use linode over Azure as I just get a far better bang for my money for my use cases.
Because even a small company can get a huge array of enterprise services, paid per user , that traditionally would've had too high of an initial investment for them to make
The big differentiator is Exchange Online (office 365) and Azure AD (Sorry Entra ID). If you already have active directory locally then it is a really nice path to the cloud.
An SMB that has people spread across the world but needs high availability for their workloads and doesn't want to have IT staff manning regional data centers or can't use colo.
I worked for a medium sized business in the US and you wouldn't believe how bad things can get... Lift and shift is a transition phase but we stopped there and now the company spends too much on azure with not much to show for it.
Oh and the reason I replied to you... Everything is still in us east 2 so it isn't like we had any geo redundancy either.
You gotta use that price calculator and look at what you can switch away from VMs. Don't run a WSUS server in Azure.
Stay on the lookout for cheaper SKUs. They get added sometimes. Azure Firewall is a good example of that.
The biggest reason are the low and no code solutions that integrate with Office 365 and Power BI if you are trying to sell it to SMB focus on the SaaS and PaaS levels.
I use it for Azure SQL because SQL Server is my preferred database and Azure Apps is good for IT spend forecasting since it's CapEX.
The understandable answer to mgt would be: cost predictability/scalability.
You pay for usage and user l8cences. Hiere more ppl, bill gets higher. Fire a few, bill gets lower. You don't pay for servers which can provide for 50 users with licenses bought in bulk, while u only have 9.
Bear in mind you’re asking an international audience here. Our market, especially SMB is very different to theirs.
I’m part of an MSP in South Africa. You’re going to have a real hard time with this in the SMB space. If you’re talking hosting compute and whatnot then your costing is likely going to be pretty high for the SMB market here. Azure to me is more of a mid market thing.
We’ve found that a lot of SMB customers here are fine with the M365 world (SharePoint, onedrive that sort of thing) and an RDS type environment with a local hosting crowd. You’ll be able to sell a VM with 30% markup for less than the cost price of an azure VM.
The view I’ve come to is there’s two types of customer. There’s one that could use the scaling, international reach, availability and all those amazing things azure offers, and have the cash to pay for it. Then you have people that just need a place for their Pastel / VIP server to go.
Depends on what „Azure“ you are talking about… Do you mean stuff like Exchange Online, SharePoint, Intune, etc. or full on stack like Azure VMs, SQL, Azure AD DS?
I support mainly MSPs and go for M365 Business Premium only if possible. Mails on Exchange, Devices in Entra, Endpoint Management on Intune, files on SharePoint. But as soon as some kind of LOB software is involved then a small on-premise server is often cheaper.
entraID, office 365 suite, teams, your cloud infra, ADO, all integrated in one mega package
can't say i love every thing in the azure ecosystem but i understand the "draw" from the business/sales perspective
Define what you mean by "Azure". Azure is several things. Technically, Azure cloud is platform-as-a-service (Paas)(Azure SQL db, Cosmo DB, App Service (web sites/web apps, file shares, managed AD, virtual desktops) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas): virtual machines, virtual networks, storage, etc.) Entra ID is Identity-as-a-service (IDaas) and M365 is SaaS. In my experience as a cloud solutions architect that does a lot of pre-sales and also someone who owns an MSP catering to the SMB market, not many SMBs are going to need PaaS and IaaS. Almost all will use M365 because they don't want the overhead of managing file servers for storage, email, collaboration or VoIP. M365 gives SMBs all of that in a per user/per month license model which is a lot cheaper than managing and maintaining all of that yourself.
Screw slimy sales guys though. Azure is not for everyone. Sales people smooth talking business to lift and shift without mentioning the actual work needed after that to make workloads efficient are the worst.
If you're just going to lift and shift, might as well go to a colocation thing.
It depends on the types of SMB. Most probably don't want to own and operate their IT/Application landscape/stack. It's a balance of cost vs service quality vs time-to-market.
You can have someone else manage it that might not be in your local area and then you only need to pay for the hours they spend managing it; much cheaper than an FTE. It can also easily open up your infrastructure to people not in one location while being able to offload the infrastructure cost; it also allows for integration with various SaaS platforms. Lots of reasons for an SMB to use Azure or any cloud platform.
Scalability & cost-effectiveness are key for SMBs; Azure's pay-as-you-go model is a big draw.
And security improvements since Microsoft handles part of solution security depending on the service used. For example, I don't have to hire some super expensive DBA to manage infrastructure, licensing, and security for our Azure SQL database. That's Microsoft's problem, and they spend several billion bucks a year on cloud security.
Plus reserving instances really cut the costs. Depending on the use case SMB can generally get the same benefits/functionality whilst minimising CAPEX
I believe you can draw attention when you compare numbers. This could be a good starting point for getting a conversation going. [https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/tco/calculator/](https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/pricing/tco/calculator/) Next to this maybe a Business Premium license for customers. Here you can see what is all in the package and then additionally compare this to what they already have? [https://m365maps.com/matrix.htm#000001000000000000000](https://m365maps.com/matrix.htm#000001000000000000000) Maybe some good information is stored at the following location: [https://cloudpartners.transform.microsoft.com/partner-gtm/csp/m365-business-premium](https://cloudpartners.transform.microsoft.com/partner-gtm/csp/m365-business-premium)
You're better off speaking to a sales person at MSFT than asking here, as most of us here are technical, not sales. But all of this completely depends on the business requirements. Azure has always worked best at scale, and out of the 3 major hyperscalers offers the best bang for the buck when it comes to large estates. But smaller businesses, even solo businesses that need a cloud presence, I would say AWS is more competitive in that field. But again, depends on the business and what they need, as some solutions Azure offers is better than AWS and vice versa.
Ease of work, no “license keys” to activate and a 100% up and running e-mail environment. Automatic deployment of programs and scripts in Intune.
Well one advantage over smaller providers like linode or digital ocean- you can power down certain resources and not pay for them (only for the data/disks) if you don’t need them constantly.
Hong from Linode here. We do still charge for Compute Instances that are powered off are not in use. This is because even while [powered off](https://www.linode.com/community/questions/415/my-linode-is-powered-off-will-it-still-be-considered-for-billing), the virtualization resources remain exclusively reserved for your immediate use and your data is actively preserved on your disk allocations. In order to stop charges on any service, that service will need to be [fully deleted](https://www.linode.com/docs/products/platform/billing/guides/stop-billing/). If you'd like to learn more about our billing practices, I've provided a few guides below: [https://www.linode.com/docs/products/platform/billing/](https://www.linode.com/docs/products/platform/billing/) [https://www.linode.com/community/questions/19389/is-linodes-prepaid-or-postpaid](https://www.linode.com/community/questions/19389/is-linodes-prepaid-or-postpaid)
Excuse my bad wording, I meant it the way you explained in detail. Still - I prefer to use linode over Azure as I just get a far better bang for my money for my use cases.
Because even a small company can get a huge array of enterprise services, paid per user , that traditionally would've had too high of an initial investment for them to make
The big differentiator is Exchange Online (office 365) and Azure AD (Sorry Entra ID). If you already have active directory locally then it is a really nice path to the cloud.
An SMB that has people spread across the world but needs high availability for their workloads and doesn't want to have IT staff manning regional data centers or can't use colo.
I worked for a medium sized business in the US and you wouldn't believe how bad things can get... Lift and shift is a transition phase but we stopped there and now the company spends too much on azure with not much to show for it. Oh and the reason I replied to you... Everything is still in us east 2 so it isn't like we had any geo redundancy either.
You gotta use that price calculator and look at what you can switch away from VMs. Don't run a WSUS server in Azure. Stay on the lookout for cheaper SKUs. They get added sometimes. Azure Firewall is a good example of that.
The biggest reason are the low and no code solutions that integrate with Office 365 and Power BI if you are trying to sell it to SMB focus on the SaaS and PaaS levels. I use it for Azure SQL because SQL Server is my preferred database and Azure Apps is good for IT spend forecasting since it's CapEX.
Use Azure, build the relationship with other public sector companies like local gov and gov contractors.
Risk
The understandable answer to mgt would be: cost predictability/scalability. You pay for usage and user l8cences. Hiere more ppl, bill gets higher. Fire a few, bill gets lower. You don't pay for servers which can provide for 50 users with licenses bought in bulk, while u only have 9.
Bear in mind you’re asking an international audience here. Our market, especially SMB is very different to theirs. I’m part of an MSP in South Africa. You’re going to have a real hard time with this in the SMB space. If you’re talking hosting compute and whatnot then your costing is likely going to be pretty high for the SMB market here. Azure to me is more of a mid market thing. We’ve found that a lot of SMB customers here are fine with the M365 world (SharePoint, onedrive that sort of thing) and an RDS type environment with a local hosting crowd. You’ll be able to sell a VM with 30% markup for less than the cost price of an azure VM. The view I’ve come to is there’s two types of customer. There’s one that could use the scaling, international reach, availability and all those amazing things azure offers, and have the cash to pay for it. Then you have people that just need a place for their Pastel / VIP server to go.
Depends on what „Azure“ you are talking about… Do you mean stuff like Exchange Online, SharePoint, Intune, etc. or full on stack like Azure VMs, SQL, Azure AD DS? I support mainly MSPs and go for M365 Business Premium only if possible. Mails on Exchange, Devices in Entra, Endpoint Management on Intune, files on SharePoint. But as soon as some kind of LOB software is involved then a small on-premise server is often cheaper.
Office 365 integration
entraID, office 365 suite, teams, your cloud infra, ADO, all integrated in one mega package can't say i love every thing in the azure ecosystem but i understand the "draw" from the business/sales perspective
Define what you mean by "Azure". Azure is several things. Technically, Azure cloud is platform-as-a-service (Paas)(Azure SQL db, Cosmo DB, App Service (web sites/web apps, file shares, managed AD, virtual desktops) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (Iaas): virtual machines, virtual networks, storage, etc.) Entra ID is Identity-as-a-service (IDaas) and M365 is SaaS. In my experience as a cloud solutions architect that does a lot of pre-sales and also someone who owns an MSP catering to the SMB market, not many SMBs are going to need PaaS and IaaS. Almost all will use M365 because they don't want the overhead of managing file servers for storage, email, collaboration or VoIP. M365 gives SMBs all of that in a per user/per month license model which is a lot cheaper than managing and maintaining all of that yourself.
No one is forcing you to use Azure if you don’t want to you are more welcome to not use it
I don't think that's the sales pitch op is looking for.
Screw slimy sales guys though. Azure is not for everyone. Sales people smooth talking business to lift and shift without mentioning the actual work needed after that to make workloads efficient are the worst. If you're just going to lift and shift, might as well go to a colocation thing.