GABRIA

Managed Cloud Support & Monitoring Service

Guaranteeing quality with Managed Azure Service

Involves a combination of best practices, tools, and continuous monitoring to ensure that services hosted on the Azure cloud meets the highest standards of performance, security, and customer satisfaction.

We help our client organizations to establish robust governance frameworks in Microsoft Azure to ensure compliance, cost-optimization, security and overall operational efficiency.

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GABRIA

Partner in Microsoft AI Cloud Partner Program

GABRIA

Microsoft Azure Certified Consultants

Managed Cloud Support & Monitoring Service

Guaranteeing quality with Managed Azure Service

Azure Well-Architected Framework: 

Provides best practices for building reliable, scalable, and secure applications on Azure. 

It covers pillars like cost optimization, security, operational excellence, performance efficiency, and reliability.

Azure Advisor:
Use Azure Advisor, a free service that provides recommendations to optimize customers Azure deployments for high availability, security, performance, and cost-efficiency.

Azure Monitor: 
Use Azure Monitor to track the performance, availability, and usage of customers managed services. Set up dashboards and alerts for critical performance metrics.

Azure Log Analytics:
Collect and analyze log data from  customers Azure resources to detect anomalies, track trends, and anticipate issues before they escalate.

Application Insights: 
Use Azure Application Insights for detailed performance monitoring of customers applications, including response times, failure rates, and dependency tracking.

Automated Alerts: 
Set up automated alerts for threshold breaches to notify you of any potential issue before it impacts service quality.

Azure Security Center: 
Use Azure Security Center to continuously assess the security of customers cloud resources. Ensure that you follow Azure’s security best practices, including encryption, access controls, and identity management.

Identity Management: 
Leverage Azure EntraID for identity and access management, ensuring that only authorized personnel have access to the resources.

Azure Cost Management and Billing: 
Regularly review usage patterns and optimize the cost and performance of services. This includes resizing VMs, using reserved instances, or migrating to more cost-effective services

Regular Updates: 
Ensure all services and applications running on Azure are updated with the latest patches, security updates, and optimizations.

Capacity Planning: 
Continuously assess the capacity of customers Azure resources to ensure they meet the demands of customers customers without over-provisioning.

Ongoing Training: 
Ensure that response teams  are continuously trained on the latest Azure updates, security practices, and tools. Azure frequently updates its services, so staying up-to-date is essential.

Continuous Improvement Frameworks: 
Implement a continuous improvement framework (DevOps) that encourages regular reflection, innovation, and enhancements.

Azure Policy: 
Use Azure Policy to enforce organizational policies and ensure compliance with internal or regulatory requirements across all resources.

Role-Based Access Control (RBAC): 
Use RBAC to control who has access to Azure resources and to assign the right level of permissions to different team members.

Optimize Resource Usage: 

  • Auto-scaling: Enable auto-scaling for VMs, App Services, or Kubernetes clusters to automatically adjust resource allocation based on demand. This helps avoid over-provisioning.
  • Shutdown VMs: Automate the shutdown of unused or idle VMs outside of working hours using 

Right-size Resources: Regularly review and adjust resource sizes (VMs, databases, storage, etc.) based on actual usage, avoiding over-provisioning.

Use the Right Pricing Model

  • Pay-As-You-Go: Best for workloads with unpredictable resource demands. You pay only for what you use.
  • Reserved Instances (RIs): Pre-purchase VM capacity for 1 or 3 years at a significant discount (up to 72% off Pay-As-You-Go prices).
  • Spot VMs: Ideal for non-critical, interruptible workloads. You can use spare Azure capacity at deep discounts.

Azure Hybrid Benefit: Allows you to use existing on-premises Windows Server and SQL Server licenses to reduce costs when migrating to Azure.

Azure Virtual Desktop
Instead of traditional desktop infrastructure, Azure Virtual Desktop (AVD) allows businesses to run virtual machines in a cost-efficient manner with multi-session capabilities and auto-scaling.

We offer two flexible service and pricing models to meet your needs:

1. Comprehensive Development and Support & Monitoring Service This is our recommended model for complex solutions. It combines active development work tailored to your project’s requirements with our continuous 18×5 support and monitoring service, providing a complete solution for building and maintaining your infrastructure.

2. Standalone Support & Monitoring Service This option provides our dedicated 18×5 support and monitoring for your existing infrastructure. The service includes an initial setup phase followed by an ongoing monthly service agreement based on the defined scope.

Service & Pricing Overview

To ensure a perfect fit for your project, our pricing and the required scope of Time & Materials (T&M) hours are flexibly determined. This is based on the specific complexity of the solution and your unique business needs.

Furthermore, we offer a range of support time options to match your operational requirements, including models beyond the standard 18×5 schedule.

Service Level Agreements (SLAs)

A Service Level Agreement (SLA) is a component of our service contract that formally defines the level of service you will receive. It specifies key metrics such as guaranteed response times for support incidents, categorized by their severity level.

Gabria as a Microsoft Azure Service provider

Service model for Microsoft Azure consumption

Gabria operates as the customer’s public cloud service provider offering a complete management of Microsoft’s Azure resources, including Azure administration and billing.

Pass-through billing option

  • Gabria invoices the end-customer for the Microsoft Azure resources
  • Microsoft invoices Gabria for the resource usage
  • Other administrative costs are negotiable based on scope and scale of the managed service

Customer Case: A Global Large-Scale Reinsurance Company

Leading the Cloud Transformation Program

The business goals of the client

Client had a business need to develop more agile, modern and comprehensive applications for insurance products to serve their global customers in a changing insurance product environment. The biggest impediment to achieving this was an outdated application infrastructure. Therefore, a rapid cloud transformation was required, to provide a flexible development platform for more than 70 various insurance and payment-gateway applications.

Objective for the cloud transformation

Our objective was to lead the cloud transformation process by improving the performance and management of client cloud-based services. We identified the need to upgrade client cloud infrastructure to meet current standards, to enhance DevOps processes, to enable user self-service, and to migrate the on-premises services to Azure cloud.

Main technical achievements of the program

  • Establishing a governance model for IT resource management
  • Optimizing cloud service costs and performance
  • Improving the security and availability
  • Implementation of user-friendly self-service features
  • Successful infrastructure migration from on-premise to Azure public cloud

Customer Case: A Global Boutique Reinsurance Company

Automating Entra Id access management in Infrastructure as Code

The business goals of the client

The purpose of the initiative was to plan and implement shared resources, AzureDevOps pipelines, Terraform code, modules and templates that provide both Azure infrastructure for application teams and automate Azure Entra Id access management and identity governance. The project uses agile methodologies to provide the foundation for the final cloud migration and digitalization of all the key functionalities of the company, thereby applying Zero Trust security principles. Before the initiative started, Azure resources were mainly deployed by Operations personnel in an unsystematic way, in Azure Portal. Entra Id (formerly Azure AD) resources were handled in an ungoverned, unplanned manner prior to the initiative.

Objective for the cloud transformation

Our objective was to contribute to the cloud transformation process especially as regards bringing access management into Infrastructure as Code, in improving documentation and in assisting the application teams during the transformation process.

Main technical achievements of the program

  • Terraform code base for Azure Entra Id access management and identity governance
  • Increased security
  • Operating as liaison for the application teams in the transformation process