Arinco boosts resiliency, security for managed services customers by using Azure Business Continuity Center

Gaining a high-level, holistic view of customers’ technology stacks

At its inception, cloud-native service provider Arinco wanted to take an innovative approach to customers’ transformation and innovation journeys with cloud and AI services. Already specializing in using and delivering Microsoft products and solutions, the company decided to offer managed services for Microsoft Azure. Arinco’s Co-Ops team soon realized that customers require support with setting up highly reliable and secure data and cloud foundations before starting to achieve business outcomes.

As Arinco welcomes new Azure customers, each brings with them potentially hundreds of Azure Backup vaults, virtual machines (VMs), SQL databases running on the VMs, storage accounts, and various Azure software as a service (SaaS) and platform as a service (PaaS) products. Monitoring each customer environment, identifying and addressing gaps, and providing consistent status reports become increasingly difficult and time-consuming. This critical capability gap made Arinco a perfect candidate to try Azure Business Continuity Center. “For our larger customers, we normally ask an engineer to do a full audit on the environment to identify the gaps, which can take days,” says Eason Liu, a consultant at Arinco. “With Azure Business Continuity Center, we can easily connect to an environment with some simple setup using Azure Lighthouse, monitor crucial metrics, and provide a comprehensive, high-level view faster than before.”

Arinco found that Azure Business Continuity Center can unlock a comprehensive view of multiple customer environments at once, reducing the time needed to sign in to each individual environment and uncover the customer‘s business continuity and disaster recovery (BCDR) posture. “The idea of business continuity is really about reliability and keeping systems up and running, and if something fails, being able to recover quickly,” says Mitch Bagan, a principal consultant at Arinco. “Azure Business Continuity Center supports those goals.”

The company rounds out its core Azure BCDR infrastructure with the full enterprise-grade security stack offered by Microsoft, including Microsoft Defender for Cloud and Microsoft Sentinel. “Defender for Cloud is a key tool in which we’re using Microsoft Secure Score as a way to continually harden the security posture of our customer environments so the risk of security incidents is reduced,” says Bagan. “Being able to easily access, monitor, and continually improve a customer‘s Secure Score provides board-level confidence that we’re on top of their security posture, their risk is low, and we can provide next steps.”

Meeting customers where they are on their resiliency journeys

BCDR is as critical as it is complex. While more companies are prioritizing all-encompassing security strategies as an essential part of doing business in compliance with policies and privacy laws, Arinco’s first step is often making the business case for organizations to adopt BCDR solutions in their policies. With multiple products feeding data into Azure Business Continuity Center, the platform plays a key role in flagging items most in need of protection. “There’s a security posture section inside Azure Business Continuity Center that lists all the protected items and their security level as excellent, good, fair, or poor,” says Bagan. “It really helps us assess what we need to prioritize with our customers.”

Laying the foundation for BCDR strategies to have maximum business impact, Arinco, led by its Co-Ops business unit, steps in as a managed service provider for its Azure customers. The company offers continuous support to run the Azure environment and deploy enhancements, freeing up customers to focus on key business objectives while they tap into benefits such as unified monitoring and built-in policies with Azure Policy. “Jobs can sometimes fail, so the unified view in Azure Business Continuity Center means we know exactly when something is wrong and what caused the issue, and we can quickly respond to bring customers’ services back to normal,” says Liu.

For customers who plan to support their Azure environment themselves but need extra time to address internal knowledge gaps, Arinco provides interim support before handing back a stable environment and upskilling the customer for the future. Arinco also plays the role of an on-demand consultant for customers who want to own their environments from day one but require technical guidance, such as reviewing infrastructure as code before deployment. “In these cases, we’re a trusted adviser rather than an end-to-end managed service,” says Bagan.

Within Azure Business Continuity Center, Arinco consultants can quickly reveal a customer’s environment mid-conversation and give feedback and reporting in real time, inspiring senior stakeholders to actively improve their BCDR technology and procedures. “The faster response helps improve our relationships with customers and strengthen the engagements,” notes Liu. Adds Bagan, “Having the single view offered by Azure Business Continuity Center provides us with rapid access to the BCDR status of our customer environments and saves us significant ongoing effort.”

Arinco also uses its Azure Done Right offering to modernize customer environments and seamlessly shift on-premises workloads and VMs to Azure landing zones. In Azure, Arinco identifies key customer workloads for modernization, refactoring and rebuilding them with the intent of moving them to PaaS-based services such as Azure Logic Apps and Azure Functions. “We run an agile development capability in our managed service and embed our resources in the customer environment using things like cost-benefit analysis to locate low-hanging fruit,” says Bagan. “Data-driven insights from Azure Business Continuity Center and Secure Score in Defender for Cloud feed into decisions aimed at cutting costs, increasing reliability and security, and reducing overhead while ultimately helping customers get the most out of what they have in Azure.”

An “invaluable” management solution

Pivotal in Arinco’s own maturity, Azure Business Continuity Center is a key resource for informing customers’ security strategies. “Before, we had to sign in to each environment separately and use different Azure products to individually monitor services such as storage accounts, VMs, and managed disks, identify recommendations, and then show them to customers,” says Bagan. “Using Azure Business Continuity Center, we can quickly take recommendations to customers, get approval, implement changes all the way to production, and then actually verify improvements through tangible metrics like updated Secure Score percentages.”

Arinco is accustomed to the lengthy process of coordinating access to multiple customer environments, but Azure Business Continuity Center, together with Azure Lighthouse, helps it easily onboard resources from different customer tenants to manage them in one place. “Scalability is key with any managed service provider, so Azure Lighthouse is essential in that we can quickly access customer environments at scale and switch between them in a single management view,” says Bagan. “Any product that allows us to see across our customers and take action for them, especially around continuity, reliability, and uptime, is a benefit to us. That’s where Azure Business Continuity Center is also aligned with our mission of providing scalable services that efficiently and quickly deliver value to customers.”

With Azure Business Continuity Center, the company can now govern, monitor, operate, and analyze protection across multiple services at scale. It’s not only able to provide a seamlessly integrated, holistic view of its customer environments, but it now does so in less time with fewer resources and less effort. “The less time we spend on regular governance tasks, the more time we can allocate to value-added BCDR and modernization work for our customers,” adds Bagan.

Arinco’s IT staff recognize that the efficiencies related to performance, cost, and business intelligence, which come with having dozens of managed services customers with thousands of Azure resources all together in one pane, are incredibly valuable and a key to future growth. “Azure Business Continuity Center saved us having to develop our own unified dashboard,” remarks Bagan. “It’s an invaluable out-of-the-box Azure offering that has helped us now focus on our customers and what we do best.”