London, UK –  Ascent today announces it has earned the Infra and Database Migration to Microsoft Azure Specialisation, validating its deep knowledge, experience and success in planning and migrating customer infrastructure and database workloads to Azure. This specialisation showcases our expertise across Windows Server and SQL Server, and across Linux and open-source database migration.

The achievement distinguishes Microsoft partners that have met stringent criteria around customer success and team-skilling, as well as passing a third-party audit of their migration practices.

Increasingly, companies seek to modernise their applications and take full advantage of the benefits that cloud computing can deliver. The end-of-support for Windows Server 2008 R2, SQL Server 2008 R2, and the upcoming end-of-support for Windows Server 2012 R2 and SQL Server 2012 R2 in October 2023 will continue to increase the demand to find partners with skills to assess, plan and migrate their existing workloads to the cloud.

Murray Foxcroft, CTO at Ascent, is delighted with the outcome. “We are very proud to add the Infra and Database Migration specialisation to our increasingly lengthy list of proven Microsoft competencies. Many organisations have speculatively placed isolated workloads into Azure and are now looking to fully migrate to leverage benefits including landing zones, policy, infrastructure as code, security and the many advantages offered by PaaS databases and services.  

The Azure cloud provides flexibility through elasticity, significantly drives down maintenance effort, increases capability and expedites deployments.

“Our extensive migration experience, significant investment in the rapid deployment of Well-Architected composable cloud infrastructure and insightful Managed Services perfectly position Ascent to help customers looking to drive business value by moving further into the cloud.”

Andrew Smith, General Manager, Partner Program Management at Microsoft adds, “The Infra and Database Migration to Microsoft Azure Specialisation highlights the partners who can be viewed as most capable when it comes to migrating Windows-based workloads; and workloads running on open-source technologies over to Azure. Ascent clearly demonstrated that they have both the skills and the experience to offer clients a path to successful migration so that they can start enjoying the benefits of being in the cloud.”