Rackspace Expands Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure

Rackspace is taking its “Fanatical Support” for Microsoft Azure across parts of Europe where it does business, including the United Kingdom, Benelux, Germany, Austria and Switzerland.

The company also announced that it has refined its Fanatical Support for Microsoft Azure service tiers across all regions to mirror support for other clouds, such as Amazon Web Services. Two new service levels, Navigator and Aviator, aim to span the migration, architecture, security and operations needs of businesses.

In his latest blog, Jeff DeVerter, Rackspace’s chief technologist, said it’s been nearly a year since his company announced Fanatical Support for Azure, which “we launched to assist customers who want to run IaaS workloads on the powerful Azure cloud, but prefer not to architect, secure and operate them firsthand.”

“Our launch of this offering marked an important expansion of our strategy to offer the world’s best expertise and service on industry-leading technologies, and is a natural progression of our 14-year relationship with Microsoft,” he said. “In addition to this expanded footprint, our service offerings are growing to include many of the Platform-as-a-Service features in Azure utilized by modern cloud applications.”{ad}

For businesses interested in infrastructure support for their Azure environment, the Navigator level offers access to tools and automation encompassing the knowledge of Azure architects and engineers, as well as on-demand access to those experts as needed.

Aviator is for customers who want a more comprehensive support experience, including guest virtual-machine management. At this level, Rackspace will perform environment build and deployment activities, in addition to ongoing management of virtual machines that includes monitoring, patching, troubleshooting and antivirus.

“The move to the cloud is inevitable, but the choice many IT and business leaders have to make is if they will embark on their cloud journey alone, or with a trusted partner,” DeVerter said.