Music in the cloud – with Microsoft Azure

Composing a solution

Swedish digital music company X5 turned to Basefarm*, a wholly-owned subsidiary of Orange Business, to help them with the challenges they faced in keeping their streaming services efficient and secure.

Orange Business explained how they could help create a more secure environment in Azure (Microsoft’s public cloud) and how they could gradually take over support 24 hours a day 7 days a week.

X5 Music, with the assistance of Orange Business, has transformed the services and simplified the solutions to such an extent that the need for staffed monitoring from Orange Business has almost disappeared in favor of more automated solutions.

Why Microsoft Azure?

There are clear benefits of using Microsoft Azure:

• Cost efficiency: you only pay for the capacity used
• Time efficiency: it frees more time for developing operations
• Scalability: you can scale up and down as needed
• Increased performance: with more services in the cloud, you get more out of your services

Using a Cloud Solution Provider

Orange Business is a Tier 1 Microsoft Cloud Solution Provider (CSP). The Microsoft CSP program enables partners to directly work with and manage the customer’s lifecycle, including provisioning, managing and supporting customer subscriptions. As a Microsoft CSP, we deal directly with Microsoft, not a CSP distributor.

Here are eight reasons why you should work directly with a Microsoft CSP like Orange Business:

1. Local support with an escalation path to Microsoft. If, for example, you use Orange Business, we will be your single point of contact for both technical matters and billing. If we need to escalate a support case to Microsoft, we have in place an advanced support agreement with better response times and priority.

2. Pay-as-you-go pricing. You pay only for what you need and what you use. There are no up-front payments, and you can end or move your subscriptions at any time.

3. Monthly consolidated billing. If you’re using other services from Orange Business, we will consolidate your charges and give you a summary invoice of all your spending, including Azure.

4. Optimized cloud spending. Controlling cloud spending is very important when using the public cloud. By understanding who is using what and at what cost, you can optimize your usage and expenses. We can help you from being over charged for services you don’t need.

5. Subscription provisioning and management. Save your IT department time and let your CSP advise and provision your subscriptions, while you maintain the same control and features.

6. Competitive pricing. Microsoft Azure is competitively priced when compared to web/direct and Microsoft Enterprise Agreement.

7. Bundled services. If you’re using Basefarm, you can choose to add the following billable options: Azure Stack as a Service, Cloud Connect (Express Route), Cloud Operation Services (24/7 monitoring, and more).

8. Experienced professionals. As an Orange Business customer, you have access to our cloud consultants and their expert support, knowledge and advise for your cloud solution.

Orange Business – your digital partner

During the course of the journey, X5 CTO Klas Broman has learned a lot, and he’s happy to share his experience:

With our vast experience in digital transformation and our proven cloud expertise, we can help you manage the challenges of your cloud migration.

Download the IDC InfoBrief: Eliminate Multicloud Chaos and Focus on Delivering Business Outcome to find out how more organizations are leveraging cloud technologies as a foundation to deliver digital business objectives.

*Basefarm is an Orange Business company.