Customers that have Unified Support from Microsoft can supplement that agreement with Enhanced Support options. One of these options is the Support for Mission Critical (SfMC) offering. Listed below are answers to the top five questions customers typically ask about SfMC.

What is the Support for Mission Critical offering?

The Support for Mission Critical offering is designed to provide comprehensive and proactive support for customers with complex and high-stakes solutions. This program aims to enhance the overall health, resiliency, and performance of mission-critical systems by offering a programmatic end-to-end approach. It includes a framework of assessments, guidance, and recommendations to continuously improve and optimize outcomes. The SfMC offering focuses on anticipating and preventing problems through corrective actions and remediation, ensuring business continuity by restoring operations quickly and safeguarding against system issue recurrence.

What workloads are the SfMC offering available for?

 The Support for Mission Critical offering is available for Intelligent Cloud, Modern Work and Business Apps workloads. Mission Critical workloads in the Intelligent Cloud are specific, named workloads hosted either entirely in Azure or under a hybrid configuration with the customer’s on premises estate. Modern Work Mission Critical workloads support the Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Teams, OneDrive for Business, and/or Endpoint Manager instances of a single customer tenant, plus supporting services and features. SfMC coverage for Business Apps workloads entails the suite of applications sharing the same metadata environment. SfMC Presales Solution Architects meet with the customer and work with the account team to ensure that the initial scoping of the engagement meets the needs of the customer’s business, addresses the challenges of their workload, and focuses on the desired outcomes.

How does the SfMC offering work? 

The Support for Mission Critical delivery team consists of designated customer leads that drive the initial assessments to understand the customer workload at a deeper level and identify potential avenues to improve the customer’s overall experience. The leads meet with the customer on a regular cadence to review the status of active support incidents, discuss new issues, challenges, and opportunities the customer is facing, provide trusted advisor guidance, and review proposed changes and improvements to the specified workload. The leads collaborate with subject matter experts from the SfMC team on an as-needed basis to ensure they are engaging the correct resources required to support and assist with the customer’s workload. 

What are the outcomes from a typical SfMC engagement?

One of the desired outcomes of an SfMC engagement is for customers to experience a decrease in the number and/or severity of reactive support incidents over time. This is accomplished by evaluating the design and operation of the workload in comparison to known best practices and recommendations, analyzing the causes and contributing factors for past reactive incidents to suggest mitigations and long-term resolutions, and providing additional resiliency guidance based on real-world experiences.

In addition, the SfMC team will work with the customer to improve the performance, availability, security, observability and cost of the workload. This can be achieved by providing training and guidance; meeting with customers at a regular cadence to discuss issues, concerns, goals, and plans; reviewing planned changes to the solution to identify potential known issues; and maintaining familiarity with the current state and configuration of the customer’s workload.

Where can I learn more about Support for Mission Critical

Customers with an existing support agreement with Microsoft can follow up with their Customer Success Account Manager or Account Executive to learn more about this and other Enhanced Support offerings from Microsoft.

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