I’m From The Future! To Azure or Not To Azure?

Hey MSPs! Buckle up—I’m coming to you from the future. And if you’re toying with the idea of jumping into Azure… well, you’re going to want to hear this.

Before we became a cloud provider, we built a thriving, seven-figure MSP. Our bread and butter? Cloud services. We were cloud-first! But our journey into the world of Azure nearly sank the whole ship…

Azure seemed like the perfect solution at first. But here’s the thing: Azure didn’t make sense for us over time, and it definitely didn’t make sense for our clients.

Pricing Puzzles That Made No Sense

Let’s talk money—because that’s where Azure started falling apart. You know how pricing has to be clear and sensible when you’re selling cloud? Azure made that impossible.

Say you’ve got a client whose on-prem server would cost $5,000. If you roll in with a $1,000/month cloud server bill? They’ll laugh. And they did, more than once.

Azure’s pricing was all over the place—ingress, egress, transactions, storage—you name it, they charge for it. The worst part? You can’t predict the monthly cost, even if you’ve had a client for 20 years!

We tried raising prices to cover the uncertainty. That backfired with our clients, so we slashed our margins instead… only to realize we were basically working for free. Not exactly a winning formula.

The Complexity Conundrum

Then came the madness of configuration. I’m talking about needing a PhD to navigate their calculator. Even with decades of IT experience, setting up a basic environment felt like defusing a bomb. And don’t even get me started on Nerdio—a tool built just to help people figure out Azure? That’s a red flag in itself!

We’d spend more time figuring out the interface than fixing the actual issue. Customers didn’t care about the maze of menus, they just wanted things fixed. But we were stuck trying to remember which submenu Microsoft had moved overnight!

The Microsoft Maze

We used to be able to get a callback within an hour with Microsoft support. A real person! Now, it’s all third-party support centers and techs who change faster than Azure’s interface.

One time? It took Microsoft two years to resolve an issue. Two. Years. And even then, the final answer was, “We’ll consider looking into the bug.”

The cherry on top? Having to hand over our clients’ info to Microsoft—only for them to turn around and contact our clients directly. What?!

Training Headaches and Tech Fatigue

Our techs needed constant retraining just to keep up with Azure’s ever-changing platform. Each week something was different: it felt like Microsoft had a full-time team just focused on moving buttons around!

Our techs were burning out just trying to stay on top of it all—and when clients were down, we couldn’t get to the fix fast enough because we were wrestling with Azure’s UI.

Turning the Tide

It got to the point where we had to make a change—or go under. So we did something bold: we became a cloud services provider ourselves. We took control of our support and infrastructure, which is how Cloud Services for MSPs was born!

And guess what? Things got better. Much better. We were back to serving our clients in a way that made sense—for them and for us.

So, to Azure or not to Azure? For us, the answer was no. If you’re going through the same struggles, send us a message so that we can help you out!

Today, I’ll leave you with a quote from Doc Brown: “Your future is whatever you make it, so make it a good one.”

Have a great week!