Business Continuity Planning with a Microsoft Azure CSP Model

In today’s digital landscape, business continuity should be a top priority for all organisations. But if your Microsoft Azure cloud infrastructure is managed on a ‘cloud solution provider’ (CSP) agreement, your business continuity and disaster recovery capabilities are at serious risk.

With a CSP, you’ve given your partner complete control of your entire cloud environment, meaning there’s certain things you don’t have access to, and perhaps don’t even know are happening.

This includes being directly reliant on them to continue meeting their own commitments to Microsoft, as well as ensuring no issues occur with their own systems or service delivery.

With your Azure cloud supporting your critical applications and processes, you must be able to ensure it can perform even in the face of a crisis. If any issues affect your ‘business-as-usual’ operations, you must be able to fix them as quickly as possible.

But with a CSP, your business continuity is in your partner’s hands.

If you then begin to experience issues with your cloud performance as a result of your partner’s own failing, there’s no way to resolve that yourself. You also can’t register a support case to Microsoft directly, it all had to run through your partner. The impact on your business could be devastating.

And there are a whole host of other potential problems which often arise from a relationship based on this model.

Such high risk is something no organisation should knowingly settle for. It’s wise to move away from a CSP for this reason alone, as Microsoft are now encouraging customers to do.

If there’s a chance your Microsoft Azure infrastructure could have placed you into a CSP arrangement, read our latest article for detailed advice on how to solve these challenges.