SERVICES > CLOUD

SMX® – A Microsoft® Partner

SMX® has been a Microsoft Legacy Gold Partner for over 10 years. SMX operates and maintains dozens of cloud enterprises and Web properties, including many on Microsoft Azure. Learn more about our Microsoft partnership…

Microsoft Azure Expert MSP

SMX is a Microsoft Azure Expert Managed Service Provider (MSP). Inclusion in this program is only awarded to trusted partners that meet stringent requirements, including verified proof of excellence in customer delivery and technical expertise; and the successful completion of an independent third-party audit of their managed services, people, processes, and technologies. Only the most high-fidelity cloud-managed service providers are awarded the Azure Expert MSP recognition, intended to give customers confidence when selecting a partner to help them meet their digital transformation goals.

As a Legacy Gold Partner, SMX holds the following competencies:

Application Integration
DevOps
Cloud Application Development
Cloud Platform
Cloud Productivity
Datacenter

Federal Rising Star Partner of the Year

SMX was named the Microsoft 2013 Federal Rising Star Partner of the Year. This award highlights and recognizes excellence and achievement in Partners who produced exceptional results for their customers, with a focus on driving innovation in the public sector. Specifically, SMX was recognized for the innovative delivery of Cloud-enabled Microsoft solutions for Enterprise communications and collaboration using Microsoft SharePoint, SQL Server, Forefront, and Systems Center. We are one of only a handful of Microsoft partners authorized to re-sell licenses of Office 365 to the Federal Government.

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Azure Migration

We specialize in high velocity critical workload migrations to Microsoft Azure for highly regulated, security, and compliance driven organizations. We assess the optimal path for migrations and the appropriate tools and technologies required that allow you to benefit from Microsoft Azure native capabilities. We use Microsoft Azure Data Box for secure offline data transfer, Microsoft Azure Site Recovery to enable your secure DR/COOP scenarios, and Microsoft Azure Migrate services to discover, assess, and migrate your data, servers, databases, and web applications with near-zero downtime. Our expert use of the Microsoft Azure Migration Assistants ensures we pinpoint and remediate any potential problems blocking migration.

Azure Data / Analytics / AI Services

One of the major benefits of having your entire IT portfolio in the cloud is the ability to leverage adjacent data sources and applications. Our data experts are also cloud experts. When considering modernizing your data assets and applications, our team will help you create the strategy, design your enterprise data architecture, and migrate seamlessly with near zero downtime to Microsoft Azure’s vast array of modern capabilities. Whether using Microsoft Azure DataBricks for your Spark-based analytics platform or building and managing models in Microsoft Azure Machine Learning, we provide a complete data pipeline capability to enable the benefits of Microsoft Azure’s AI services for image, speech, and textual analysis.

IT and Application Modernization

Customers leverage our Microsoft Azure Experts to modernize their IT portfolio. Our certified experts build scalable secure web apps using Microsoft Azure App Service, automate business processes with Microsoft Azure Logic Apps, and build event-driven serverless architectures using Event Grid and Microsoft Azure Functions. We build, secure, manage and monitor Microsoft Azure Kubernetes Services for your containerized workloads. We provide the full life cycle of services from strategy, assessment and design to implementation, migration, and 24×7 secure operations.

Security and Governance

Customers depend on us to operate and secure their mission-critical applications. When connected to Microsoft Azure Sentinel and Azure Defender, Microsoft Azure Security Center provides a comprehensive view of threats, compliance, and potential misconfigurations of your IT assets. These services, along with Microsoft Azure Policy and Azure Blueprints, are integrated into our Intelligent Automation Platform (IAP) to provide our customers with the highest levels of security accreditation to meet and exceed their security mandates.

Elevate the security of your Microsoft Azure workloads by registering for an SMX Azure security assessment here.

Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure and SMX Elevate™.

The Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure aligns with SMX Elevate™ by providing a set of digital tools, best practices, and frameworks to support cloud adoption, migration, development, and optimization for our clients. SMX Elevate services and solutions ensure successful outcomes for our customers which are aligned with the Microsoft Azure Cloud Adoption Framework. SMX combines full lifecycle cloud services, highly accredited experts, a platform of digital tools, and an internally developed IP to accelerate engagements and deliver measurable technology transformation.

Strategy (SMX Strategy)

SMX Strategy guides clients as they make complex cloud decisions by exploring best practices and solutions that improve adoption and maximize return on investment. SMX Strategy engagements are led by highly accredited and experienced teams who are equipped with digital tools and frameworks that accelerate and facilitate strategic the decision making process.

Explore motivation.
Prioritize business outcomes.
Factor in financial considerations.
Identify technical needs.

Plan (SMX Strategy)

SMX Strategy teams help unlock the cloud’s potential to drive business outcomes and financial value. We engage with clients to get a deep understanding of their business objectives, current state and explore strategic choices to transform their cloud journeys. We then model a target state that provides a clear picture of the end game, galvanizes stakeholders around a future state, and optimizes return on cloud investments. Teams formalize recommendations in executive summaries and develop capability roadmaps that provide actionable next steps and identify key resource needs.

Rationalize your digital estate.
Ensure organizational alignment.
Develop skills readiness plan.
Establish a DevOps cloud adoption plan.

Ready (SMX Build)

Build engagements help identify the key business drivers and requirements to formulate solution options which drive organizational outcomes. SMX experts provide advisory and consulting services to evaluate and select solutions that best match business needs. Our teams build and implement the solutions with embedded governance and security protections. Solutions are delivered with automated and reusable code components.

Operating model alignment.
Azure landing zone conceptual architecture.
Azure landing zone design areas.
Implementation options.

Migrate (SMX Migrate)

Engaging SMX for migration services ensures client migrations deliver more than just the movement of workloads. Our teams of highly experienced and certified cloud experts work with clients to conduct thorough assessments that identify multiple migration options leveraging a mix of lift and shift and refactoring. This enables organizations to quickly and easily adopt next generation cloud services optimizing both performance and cost – unlocking cloud’s value potential.

Azure migration guide.
Migration scenarios.
Cloud migration best practices.
Process improvements.

Innovate (SMX Optimize)

Optimize delivers financial and infrastructure strategies that enable clients to continuously adapt cloud resources to balance performance, innovation, consumption, and spend in real time. Applying SRE and well-architected principles can right size expensive application components, significantly reduce cloud consumption, and lowering cost without sacrificing performance or innovative capabilities. Optimize services provide a critical, sometimes missing link between cloud usage, finance, and business strategy. Our suite of digital tools and teams of highly accredited experts provide you with the information needed to move away from top-down capex cost management towards modern, cloud models that enable efficiency by driving bottom-up ownership and accountability.

Business value consensus.
Build your first MVP.
Measure for customer impact.
Expand digital inventions.

Secure (SMX Secure)

Secure delivers advanced technologies and capabilities that minimize security risks by identifying and protecting against threats from digital attacks across multi-cloud and on-premises environments, networks, applications, and data storage platforms. SMX Secure teams and services provide protection that ensures availability, integrity, and confidentiality for your applications and data regardless of where they are hosted. Our platform automates deployment of security guardrails for cloud native services and monitors cloud environments cost effectively and at scale using advanced technologies and capabilities that address evolving threats and meet complex regulatory requirements.

Risk insights.
Business resilience.
Asset protection.

Manage (SMX Manage)

SMX Manage delivers Managed Service Provider (MSP) operations for cloud centric organizations. Our Intelligent Automation Platform (IAP) provides clients with an integrated suite of tools and highly automated practices that are needed to effectively build, operate, and secure cloud environments and applications at scale.

Business commitments.
Management baseline.
Expand the baseline.
Advance operations and design principles.

Govern (SMX Comply)

Comply engagements shepherd federal agencies, defense mission owners, contractors, and independent software vendors through compliance certification processes. Comply accelerates the accreditation journey for cloud solutions to comply with DoD RMF, FISMA, FedRAMP, StateRAMP with support for multiple security categorization levels: low, moderate, high, and 2/4/5/6. Comply assesses the implementation of NIST SP 800-53 Security and Privacy Controls for Information Systems and ensures your organization meets due diligence standards for complying with HIPAA and PCI information security and privacy risk requirements.

Methodology.
Benchmark assessment.
Governance foundation.
Improve the foundation.

Modernize (SMX Modernize)

Cloud services evolve constantly, Modernize helps you explore and identify an optimal mix that will deliver the highest returns for your investment. Modernize digital tools and capabilities accelerate the delivery of cloud native applications. Technologies such as microservices, containers, serverless, streaming analytics, artificial intelligence (AI), and robotic process automation (RPA) are changing the speed at which companies can respond to rapidly changing client expectations and market conditions. Aging application architecture might not be able compatible with these emerging technologies.

Monolithic Apps to Microservices.
Mainframe Modernization.
Cloud Native App Development.

SMX Value Added Services to Azure Native Services.

SMX Microsoft Cloud Adoption Framework for Azure foundation includes an Operations Baseline, Enhanced Baseline, Platform Operations, Workload Operations capabilities to support mission critical systems across the OS, database, application levels. SMX value added services in addition to Azure native services include:

Operations Baseline

An Operations Baseline is key to establishing a secure and repeatable approach for building and operating cloud environments. SMX leverages a robust library of existing solutions, code, and templates to accelerate the development of your Operations Baseline.

Landing Zone model and architecture development
Incident Management
Managed Operations
Monitoring and Alerting
Logging and Auditing controls
Inventory management
Change and configuration drift detection
Patch Management
Backup and Disaster Recovery

Enhanced Baseline

The SMX Enhanced Baseline evolves from the established Operations Baseline to optimize, automate, and scale with the organization helping to continuously improve your cloud estate and posture.

Scalable Solutions
Enhanced Monitoring
Automation runbooks
Security and Breach Notifications
Advanced Security Services
Continuous Compliance
Cost Optimization

Platform Operations

SMX supports all Azure management tools across baseline and enhanced baseline to include:

Baseline: Infrastructure Service INCIDENT Management, SLA MANAGEMENT, Log Aggregation Service, Boundary and network Management, Infrastructure Provisioning, SERVERLESS COMPLIANCE, LOGGING, AND REAL-TIME MONITORING, Container Service Monitoring, Monitoring and Notification Service, Operating System Patch Management, Anti-malware Management Service, Backup Service
Enhanced Baseline: Cloud Service Expense Management Advisory, Infrastructure Advisory, Database Monitoring, Security Incident Response, Enhanced Log Aggregation and Analysis, Host Intrusion Detection/Prevention, Host File Integrity Monitoring, Systems Vulnerability Scanning, Continuous Monitoring Security and Regulatory Compliance Support Services

Workload Operations

SMX offers additional mission-critical workload operations as required by customers adding to enhanced baseline or platform operations. Support services include the following:

Mission critical workload dedicated Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) services are suited for customers who are seeking our team members with specialized DevSecOps skillsets to be embedded with their platform or application teams. The value proposition of the SRE model is that customers receive an advanced level of build and support functions through the intrinsic and inherent knowledge of the SRE team members who have helped build the systems. The SRE team is charged with building highly reliable and resilient systems, automating deploy processes, and continually improving the systems they manage.
Application Control monitoring service can alert you when changes happen to key software on your protected servers. Based on your policy configuration, application control either prevents unauthorized software from running until it is explicitly allowed or allows unauthorized software until it is explicitly blocked. The system is operated in Maintenance or Enforcement modes. Maintenance mode allows the application inventory to be developed and updated. When Enforce mode is active it blocks access, preventing unauthorized changes. Leveraging application control requires strong collaboration with Client workload and application owners to seamlessly manage and approve changes. The service leverages our Application Control capability to provide alerts and response to identified events 24 x 7. The identification of protected files can be customized to meet customer security concerns.

For more information, please contact an SMX Cloud Assured Account Manager.

[email protected] | 703-435-3322

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Wherever you are on your transformation journey, SMX can help you get there faster and more effectively.