In Q1 2025, Forrester combined two previously separate Wave evaluations, one for application modernization and migration services and another for multicloud managed services.
Forrester’s rationale was that customers increasingly combine the build, modernize, and operate phases, and client references preferred a single supplier across modernize and run by a 4:1 margin.
That preference reflects a structural reality most mid-market teams already feel. Building new capabilities requires one kind of focus. Operating them reliably requires another. Covering both with the same small team works until it doesn’t, and the breaking point usually arrives without warning.
In this edition, I will show you why Azure environments outgrow internal teams and when engaging a managed services provider becomes a structural necessity.
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Why can’t the same team cover all three phases
Build work that rewards exploration and risk-taking. Operations reward vigilance and consistency. Modernization requires holding both modes simultaneously while maintaining stable production.
Context-switching between these modes drains attention. When the same five engineers own all three, they optimize for whatever feels most urgent that week. The other phases wait.
What the data shows
DORA’s 2024 report shows the share of respondents in the high-performance cluster fell from 31% to 22%, while the low-performance cluster rose from 17% to 25%.
It also surfaced an unusual pattern: the medium cluster showed higher stability on at least one key measure than the high cluster, forcing a real choice between “deploy more often with more failures” versus “deploy less often with fewer failures.
That does not mean speed and stability are fully decoupled. The report still notes that throughput and stability remain correlated within each cluster.
What you can do
Map which phase is currently losing attention. If modernization keeps getting deferred or incidents keep pulling engineers off feature work, the structure is already strained.
Azure’s operational surface keeps expanding
Azure spans 200+ services. Each additional workload increases the number of configurations to manage across identity, networking, cost controls, and policy enforcement.
As subscriptions and workloads multiply, governance varies across subscriptions. Thus, friction in risk and audit increases. In practice, many mid-market environments end up governed subscription-by-subscription, which fragments visibility and cost attribution.
The visibility gap
Small teams see patterns only within their own scope. Is 14% CPU utilization inefficient or normal? Is three hours an acceptable incident response time?
An MSP managing 50+ Azure environments sees that 14% CPU across comparable workloads. They know your three-hour incident response is double the benchmark because they track MTTR across clients. That pattern recognition is the visibility you can’t build internally.
A mid-market manufacturing company learned this after expanding to 19 subscriptions. Inconsistent policies and fragmented cost tracking had accumulated quietly.
After centralizing governance through an MSP, they recovered $170K in the first year from previously hidden waste.
The MSP implemented consistent tagging standards across all 19 subscriptions, enforced Azure Policy at the management group level, and established monthly cost attribution reviews.
The waste had been invisible because no one had ownership of cross-subscription visibility.
What you can do
Audit how governance is applied across subscriptions. If policies vary or cost attribution is inconsistent, the visibility gap is already widening.
What your symptoms actually reveal
The breaking point shows up in patterns that feel like execution problems but trace back to structural overload.
Neglected build
Architecture decisions are revisited repeatedly. Features are shipping late because engineers keep getting pulled into production issues. Design discussions are restarting because no one documented the last decision.
When a build is neglected, an MSP provides architectural review capacity. They staff solution architects who join design discussions, document decisions, and ensure that what gets built can be operated. Your engineers’ ship features; the MSP ensures the foundation holds.
Neglected modernization
Refactoring estimates are growing quarter over quarter. Tech debt is surfacing in every sprint, but is never getting prioritized. Legacy systems stay legacy because touching them risks stability.
When modernization is neglected, an MSP brings platform engineering. Research shows organizations with dedicated platform teams deliver faster with better reliability. An MSP can implement Azure Landing Zones, CI/CD pipelines, and infrastructure-as-code without pulling your developers off feature work.
Neglected operations
More people are joining incident calls than the problem requires. Cost anomalies are sitting unaddressed for 90+ days. Alert fatigue is setting in because no one has time to tune thresholds.
When operations are neglected, an MSP provides 24/7 coverage, tuned alerting, and incident response with defined SLAs. The DORA data showing high performers dropped from 31% to 22% reflects teams losing operational discipline as complexity grows. An MSP’s NOC doesn’t context-switch between shipping and responding.
What you can do
Identify which phase is accumulating debt fastest. If the backlog spans all three, the issue is capacity. That’s when the question changes from “how do we catch up” to “what operational model actually fits our scale.”
Most teams wait until something breaks to revisit their operational model. By then, the backlog includes deferred modernization, accumulated policy drift, and engineers who’ve spent months context-switching instead of building.
The cost is the compound effect of decisions delayed while the team was stretched too thin. If the patterns in this edition sound familiar, the shift is already overdue. Explore how Azure Expert MSPs structure the transition.
