A Quick Introduction to Microsoft’s Support for Mission Critical Offering

Customers who receive integrated support from Microsoft can supplement their contracts with enhanced support options. One of these options is the Support for Mission Critical (SfMC) product. Below you will find answers to five key questions our customers commonly ask about SfMC.

What are Mission Critical Support Services?

Mission Critical Support Services are designed to provide comprehensive, proactive support to customers using complex, high-risk solutions. The program aims to improve the overall health, resiliency, and performance of mission-critical systems by providing a programmatic, end-to-end approach. It includes a framework of assessments, guidelines and recommendations to continuously improve and optimize outcomes. SfMC services focus on predicting and preventing problems through corrective action and resolution, ensuring business continuity by quickly restoring operations and preventing recurrence of system problems.

What workloads can SfMC products be used for?

Mission-critical support services are available for intelligent cloud, modern work, and business app workloads. Mission-critical workloads in the Intelligent Cloud are specific, named workloads that are hosted entirely in Azure or in a hybrid configuration with the customer’s on-premises assets. Modern business mission-critical workloads support instances of Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, OneDrive for Business, and/or Endpoint Manager in a single customer tenant, as well as supporting services and features. SfMC coverage for business app workloads involves a suite of applications that share the same metadata environment. SfMC Pre-Sales Solutions Architects meet with customers and work with account teams to ensure the initial scope of the engagement meets the customer’s business requirements, addresses workload issues, and is focused on desired outcomes.

How do SfMC products work?

Our mission-critical support team is comprised of a designated customer lead who conducts an initial assessment to gain a deeper understanding of customer workloads and identify potential ways to improve the customer’s overall experience. Leads meet with customers on a regular basis to review the status of active support incidents, discuss new issues, challenges, and opportunities facing customers, provide trusted advisor guidance, and review proposed changes and updates for assigned workloads. Review improvements. The lead will work with appropriate experts on the SfMC team as needed to ensure the right resources are utilized to support and support our customers’ workloads.

What are the typical outcomes of SfMC participation?

One of the desired outcomes of an SfMC contract is for the customer to experience a reduction in the number and/or severity of response support incidents over time. It evaluates the design and operation of your workloads against known best practices and recommendations, analyzes the causes and contributing factors of past response incidents, suggests mitigation and long-term solutions, and provides additional resiliency guidance based on real-world environments. This is done by doing. experiences.

The SfMC team also partners with customers to improve the performance, availability, security, observability, and cost of their workloads. This can be achieved by providing training and guidance. We meet with clients regularly to discuss issues, concerns, goals and plans. Review planned changes to the solution to identify potential known issues. Maintains familiarity with the current state and configuration of customer workloads.

Where can I learn more about mission-critical support?

Customers with an existing support contract with Microsoft can follow up with their Customer Success account manager or account representative to learn more about this and other premium support services from Microsoft.