SingleHop Extends Managed IT Services Reach to Microsoft Azure

Moving to the Public Cloud: Six Steps for Success

With Microsoft Azure gaining traction in the cloud, many IT organizations are looking for a little help in managing the Microsoft public cloud platform. Rising to meet that demand, SingleHop today extended its managed IT services offering to include support for Microsoft Azure.

Jordan Jacobs, vice president of products for SingleHop, says that unlike most other managed service providers (MSPs), SingleHop via its ServiceFirst platform gives customers the option of managing Microsoft Azure on their own using SingleHop tools or having SingleHop manage it for them. This co-managed approach to the cloud, says Jacobs, is designed to reduce the friction that often develops between internal IT organizations and an MSP.

Jacobs says SingleHop accomplishes this via an application that can be downloaded and installed on a customer’s server in minutes to provide access to the SingleHop ServiceFirst management platform.

Previously, SingleHop offered managed services that spanned IT applications and systems running on-premise or in the data centers it managed. Support for Microsoft Azure is the first of several clouds that SingleHop intends to add to its support lineup in the months ahead.

For the most part, Jacobs concedes that SingleHop is usually brought into organizations via line of business (LOB) units that don’t have access to IT management resources or that don’t want to engage their internal IT departments to support their applications. However, as cloud computing continues to mature, Jacobs says that more internal IT organizations are taking a more mature approach to managing IT that relies increasingly on the expertise of eternal IT service providers.