After throwing in the towel on its own plans to build out public cloud services, Hewlett Packard Enterprise Co. has announced a portfolio of managed services for Microsoft Azure, aimed at helping chief information officers steer through their companies’ digital transformation.

The move builds on a partnership HPE and Microsoft announced last year around cloud, mobility and productivity. The managed services launched this week cover design, deployment, delivery and daily operational support for Microsoft Azure, provided by HPE’s Enterprise Services team.

HPE reckons its managed services are needed to help enterprises combat the array of challenges that arise from trying to implement traditional, private and public cloud infrastructures. The Managed Services for Microsoft Azure offering addresses the public cloud component of enterprises’ end-to-end hybrid infrastructure requirements, HPE said.

“The Microsoft Azure cloud platform is designed to deliver hybrid solutions tailored to the unique needs of enterprise clients,” Mike Neil, corporate vice president for enterprise cloud at Microsoft, said in a statement. “This offering from HPE Enterprise Services allows us to provide the right balance of public, private and traditional IT solutions for our mutual customers.”

HPE Managed Services for Microsoft Azure covers the following areas:

• Management of virtual server, storage and network infrastructure so that clients can focus on their business’s core competencies
• Service provisioning and de-provisioning as well as infrastructure configurations management so that clients can govern their resources usage based on their application requirements
• Operations support, active directory management, operating system patching services – all to allow the IT and Business leaders to focus on achieving business outcomes
• Backup and recovery services, and Security services to ensure that best practices are implemented to protect company data and support security certifications

Besides the managed services, HPE also offers cloud native application development, application migration and transformation services, and a set of Big Data and analytics capabilities on Azure.

Image courtesy of Microsoft