Microsoft cuts cost of Azure Support – Advantage Consumer
The three major players in the cloud infrastructure, Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, are eager to win market share. Each company is continuing to innovate, add new features, and enhancing their offerings to win.
Microsoft recently announced a significant price cut for its most popular, Azure Standard Support plan, to help entice more businesses to their platform. It has cut the monthly support price from $300 to $100, plus it has shortened its response time for critical issues from 2 hours to one. Azure Government customers will also see the reduction from $375 to $125 a month.
The Partner community is excited to offer their customers, the most cost effective option among the major providers.
https://azure.microsoft.com/en-us/updates/azure-standard-support-updates/
The 5 support tiers for Microsoft Azure support:
- Basic (FREE) – Every plan offers 24×7 access to customer service, documentation, whitepapers, and support forums. Also included is access to personalized Service Health Dashboard & Health API.
- Developer ($29/month) – Unlimited contacts & unlimited cases. The Developer plan also grants users business hours access to Support Engineers via email and a less than 8 hour response time.
- Standard ($100/month) – Moving up to the Standard plan will allow users 24×7 access to Support Engineers via email and phone, and less than an hour response time for critical business impact issues.
- Professional Direct ($1,000/month) – The main benefits of the Professional Direct plan are shortened response time windows from the previous tier, and architectural guidance based on best practice delivered by ProDirect Delivery Manager. They also will give onboarding services, service reviews, Azure Advisor consultations during your time as a subscriber.
- Premier (by quote) – For even more hands-on help, this final tier allows for Customer specific architectural support such as design reviews, performance tuning, configuration and implementation assistance delivered by Microsoft Azure technical specialists. Also included is a less than 15-minute response window for critical issues via Azure Rapid Response.
The Standard support tier seems to be the best and the most popular support plans, and this price reduction will make it an even more attractive.