Azure Without an Azure Team
Architecture, identity, backup, and cost management for your Azure environment — designed so it stays understandable, and billed so you can predict it.
45 min · Free · No commitment
The cloud bill nobody can explain
Azure gets adopted one resource at a time. Someone spins up a VM for a project. A developer adds a database. A vendor asks for a storage account. Eighteen months later the bill has tripled, nothing is tagged, and no single person can tell you what half of it is for or whether anything still depends on it.
The technical debt compounds quietly. Resources sit in the wrong region, oversized from a load test nobody scaled back down. Identity is a mix of cloud accounts and leftover on-premises trusts. Backups exist for some workloads and not others, and nobody has confirmed which is which.
Facet MSP treats Azure as infrastructure that has to be operable by people who are not full-time cloud engineers. That means documented architecture, resources tagged to an owner, right-sized capacity reviewed monthly, and identity consolidated into one place with MFA enforced.
Built to be operated, not just deployed
Architecture & Landing Zone Design
A resource structure with sensible subscriptions, resource groups, naming, and tagging from the start. The difference between an environment you can reason about in year three and one you are afraid to touch.
Identity & Access Management
Entra ID configured properly — conditional access, MFA enforcement, role-based access with least privilege, and privileged accounts separated from daily-driver accounts. Identity is the actual perimeter in Azure.
Cost Management & Right-Sizing
Every resource tagged to an owner and a purpose, budgets with alerts, reserved capacity where the workload is steady, and a monthly review that names what changed. Cloud cost control is an operating habit, not a one-off cleanup.
Virtual Machine & Workload Management
Patching, monitoring, and backup for Azure-hosted servers, handled the same way we handle everything else in your environment. Cloud hosting does not remove the need for someone to run the operating system.
Azure Backup & Recovery
Backup policy applied per workload with defined retention, plus tested restores. Azure will happily replicate a corrupted file — replication is not backup, and the distinction matters at the worst possible moment.
Networking & Connectivity
Virtual networks, VPN or ExpressRoute connectivity to your offices, network security groups, and private endpoints so internal services are not needlessly reachable from the public internet.
Monitoring & Alerting
Alerts that route to us rather than into a portal nobody logs into. Capacity, availability, and cost anomalies surface as tickets we act on, with the ones that need your decision escalated by phone.
An environment you can reason about
- Every resource has an owner, a purpose, and a tag
- The monthly bill is explainable line by line
- Identity is consolidated with MFA genuinely enforced
- Backups are defined per workload and actually tested
- Capacity gets right-sized instead of quietly growing
- Architecture is documented, so you are not locked to one engineer
Cloud infrastructure that outlives its architect
We document as we build.
An Azure environment only one person understands is a business risk regardless of how well it is designed. Documentation is part of delivery, not an afterthought.
We will tell you Azure is the wrong answer.
Plenty of workloads are cheaper and simpler left on a server in your office or moved to a SaaS product. Recommending Azure for everything would be easier for us and worse for you.
Cost review has named owners.
Tagging every resource to a person and a purpose is what makes a monthly review possible. Untagged environments cannot be optimized, only guessed at.
Azure questions
How is this different from your Microsoft 365 service?
Microsoft 365 is the productivity suite — email, Teams, SharePoint, the licensing. Azure is infrastructure: virtual machines, databases, networking, storage. They share an identity system in Entra ID, which is why we manage them together, but the work is genuinely different.
Our Azure bill keeps climbing. Can you actually reduce it?
Usually, yes, and the first pass is often substantial — oversized virtual machines, orphaned disks and public IPs, forgotten test environments, and workloads that should be on reserved pricing. What keeps it down afterward is the monthly review, not the one-time cleanup.
Do we need Azure if we already use Microsoft 365?
Not necessarily, and we will say so. Many small businesses need no Azure infrastructure at all. It earns its place when you have line-of-business applications that need a server, or specific data residency and networking requirements.
Can you take over an Azure environment somebody else built?
Yes, and it is a common starting point. The first phase is discovery and documentation — mapping what exists, what depends on what, and what is safe to decommission. We do not begin changing an environment we have not yet mapped.
Is replication the same as backup?
No, and conflating them causes real data loss. Replication copies your current state, including corruption and ransomware encryption, to a second location. Backup keeps recoverable point-in-time copies. You need both, configured deliberately and tested.
Ready to take this off your plate? Six questions.
Spend 90 seconds answering. We'll spend a few hours putting together a written assessment of where your IT stands — and a 45-minute call with one of our engineers.