Macquarie Cloud Services Leads Organizations on Journeys Through Digital Transformation and Cloud Hosting

TL; DR: Macquarie Cloud Services specializes in helping organizations navigate their journeys through digital transformation. The company works with businesses to facilitate moves from on-premises infrastructure to Azure’s public cloud hosting platform and hybrid hosting environments that can include a mix of public and private cloud. Macquarie also provides security services via its managed SOC & SIEM, and delivers colocation services, disaster recovery, and data backups, among many other solutions. The company’s goal is to match an organization’s infrastructure with its specific business mission.

Digital transformation has become quite the catch phrase over the past few years — and with good reason. Companies that reevaluate their digital strategies are more likely to have a competitive edge when it comes to staying agile and being able to pivot to meet customer demands.

From an infrastructure perspective, digital transformation can mean a number of things. For many organizations, it’s all about moving away from on-premises, legacy systems and into the cloud. For others, digital transformation involves deploying a multi-cloud infrastructure strategy — a hybrid approach that leverages any combination of on-premises hardware, public cloud, and private cloud solutions.

But devising a sound strategy and understanding what’s at stake in making drastic changes to an infrastructure approach isn’t easy. As a result, many C-suite executives are turning to consultants and service providers, such as Macquarie Cloud Services, to help them carve out the right path toward moving operations and workloads to the cloud.

When asked about some of the trends he’s seen over the past few years, Andy Stewart, Principal Consultant at Macquarie Cloud Services, noted that many organizations have begun to see the benefits the hybrid cloud brings.

“Businesses and service providers recognize that there is no single optimum platform,” he said. “There is a solution for all clients regardless of preference, workloads, and consumption.”

Macquarie Cloud Services operates with the goal to find the right infrastructure fit for an organization’s business mission, whether that be public cloud hosting through Azure, private cloud hosting, or a hybrid approach. The firm specializes in these areas, but also delivers security services via its managed SOC & SIEM, and provides colocation services, disaster recovery, and data backups, among many other solutions.

“[It’s been a challenge] to provide the same high levels of customer value and service when supporting a cloud platform that is not directly ours,” Andy said. “For example, Azure took a great deal of planning. But we believe we’ve pulled it off. Our Azure practice is the fastest growing in Australia.”

There’s a reason why the team at Macquarie Cloud Services is so adept at advising its clients on the move to the cloud — experience. The organization was founded in 1992 as a telecom business and charged itself with providing excellent customer service, something Andy told us was definitely lacking in the Australian market at the time.

Then, the company expanded and moved into hosting and began building datacenters.

“The mindset was to provide exceptional service in an under-served market,” Andy said. “Having the combination of datacenters and private cloud services allowed us to support customers as they made their way along their own personal journeys to the cloud — from on-prem to colocation to managed private cloud.”

After Andy joined the team in 2012 as a Solutions Architect covering telco and hosting solutions, Macquarie evolved to provide more business solutions within the core infrastructure and security space, including embracing Azure as its public cloud of choice.

“We know where we play well, and we stick to that rather than trying to be all things to all businesses,” he said. “Customer service is in our DNA and we believe in PAS (Personal Accountable Service). Our customers know they’ll speak to our technical expert support team, based locally 24×7 who are empowered to help the customer from the first call.”

Macquarie Cloud Services specializes in helping move clients to Azure’s public cloud platform. However, the company also understands that the public hyperscalers don’t always meet the needs of certain organizations. That’s why Macquarie Cloud Services also leverages its own infrastructure to deliver private cloud solutions or allow clients to take a hybrid approach.

“Owning and operating our own datacenters, from which we operate our own private cloud, gives us a great deal of control, both technically and commercially,” Andy said. “This provides a significant benefit to our customers as they evolve and grow.”

As a result of Macquarie Cloud Services’ flexibility and solutions set, the company’s client group is quite diverse. Mid-market and large businesses across Australia turn to the company for infrastructure consulting and services. And, as Andy told us, these clients really appreciate the hands-on support they receive throughout their life cycle as customers.

“We focus on local customer service and customer service excellence — the best NPS in industry — in Australia. All of our customer-facing support staff are residents in Australia,” Andy said. “We also have strong ties to the Federal Government, and we look after over 42% of Federal Agencies, including the Prime Minister’s Office.”

Andy said that Macquarie Cloud Services has always maintained an effective feedback loop with its customers. The goal, according to Andy, is to look for areas where improvements can be made, and this feedback sometimes informs the company’s internal development processes.

“Our Product Managers do a lot of research and development into developing trends, but customer feedback is also a strong feed into our road map,” Andy said. “With MCS’ strong vendor relationships we also get a lot of information from VMware, Dell Technologies, Microsoft, Cisco, and others relating to their internal road maps, and we can use that to help develop our next big thing.”

Andy told us that he’s seen an increased focus on cyber security and business continuity. And this, he hypothesized, is likely due to the recent increase in sophisticated ransomware attacks in Australia and globally.

“Our Cyber Security Practice is an exciting opportunity to provide additional value to our customers, giving great insight into how their applications communicate, how their data flows around their environment, and of course to capture malicious activities,” he said. “Our long-standing Government services have been a great starting point for the new Practice, although of course the corporate sector has some quite different challenges to the Government sector.”

Andy also mentioned that many customers have already made the move from on-premises services into single or multicloud platforms and are growing their use of cloud-hosted, SaaS products.

“Continuing to develop our existing offerings and developing new ones to match that journey and to continue to provide benefits, be it from a risk management, reporting, technical flexibility or commercial perspective, is a continually exciting path for us,” Andy said. “We were the fastest Microsoft partner in the country to achieve the Azure-only Expert MSP credential relative to business inception, a testament to the maturity of the cloud business and the recent growth of our Azure practice.”