For immediate release. Auckland, New Zealand, 25 August 2026.
More businesses run on Azure than ever, at every size. Microsoft's Azure revenue passed US$100 billion for the first time in its 2026 financial year (Microsoft, reported July 2026), and an estimated 350,000 businesses worldwide now run on Azure, the majority of them small and mid-sized (HG Insights, 2024). They need it secure, reliable, and able to keep up as the business grows and changes. Most don't have the specialist people in-house to keep it that way, so they lean on their managed service provider to look after it.
Most Azure optimization starts and stops at cost. A business's real needs run wider: security, compliance, resilience, and how well the environment is operated day to day. Microsoft frames the same breadth in its Well-Architected Framework, five pillars of a well-run cloud: reliability, security, cost optimization, operational excellence and performance efficiency. Cost is one pillar of five, and usually the one a client asks about first.
A new first-look report from Spotto, the AI-assisted cloud operations platform for MSPs, puts numbers to how the work actually splits. Drawn from an analysis of 450+ Azure subscriptions run by ANZ managed service providers, it found that cost was under 4% of the improvement work worth doing, while 92.4% was security, compliance and reliability. Usually it's a roadmap of quiet, worthwhile improvements: sequenced by what's worth doing now versus what can wait, scoped for effort, and ready for a provider to take to a client as real, billable projects.
For the end client, that work is what a looked-after cloud actually feels like: an environment that's more secure, more reliable and better governed, with the cost questions that usually open the conversation handled along the way.
This is where a lot of MSP growth now lives: helping clients with what their cloud genuinely needs, across all five pillars. Two things stand between a provider and that growth, and both are real work. The first is finding the wider work in the first place, which eats hours an MSP's best engineers rarely have. The second is helping the client see its value, so they're ready to act on work they didn't think to ask for. Winning a new client is expensive, and the work already inside a client an MSP has won carries almost none of that cost.
Businesses depend on their cloud running the way it should, and most rely on their MSP to make sure it does. Most of that wider work is already sitting in a client's environment. The job is finding it across every estate, and then helping the client understand why it matters. We built Spotto to take that weight off the provider: surface the work, put it in the client's own language, and present it as something the customer is happy to approve. The client ends up with a cloud that's genuinely looked after, and the provider gets the credit for it.
Shaun Webber, co-founder and CEO of Spotto.
Spotto is built to support the whole job. It surfaces the work that would typically take an engineer hours to find by hand, turns each recommendation into everyday business language as a client-ready statement of work, and presents the findings and the roadmap through white-labelled reports the MSP can put straight in front of a client. The provider brings the plan, in the client's language, with the effort already scoped and an ROI against it.
Early adopters are turning that visibility into growth their clients feel. Umbrellar Technology Group, a New Zealand cloud provider, surfaced between US$6–10K of billable work a month in a single client environment it could take straight to the client. The pattern held each time: the provider walked into the client conversation already knowing what mattered.
About Spotto
Spotto is the AI-assisted cloud operations platform for Cloud MSPs. It surfaces the billable services work across a client's Azure estate, packages it into a client-ready statement of work in plain business language, and presents it back through white-labelled reports, so a provider can bring a client a roadmap of valuable work without putting a senior architect on every review. Spotto was founded by the team behind cloud MSP Parallo.
Media contact
Abi Spence, Head of Marketing, Spotto. Auckland, New Zealand. [email protected]
Figures are drawn from Spotto's own analysis of connected ANZ customer estates, August 2026. They describe the AU deployment and are not presented as a global figure.