The Future of Operations study series provides our partners with deep insight into the small to medium sized business segment.
We invest in quantitative data to support your ability to respond ahead of emerging demand.
Let’s turn this insight into action!
To help our partners monetise demand trends in the study, we’ve matched solutions from our portfolio to analysis of SMB objectives, prioritised IT actions and adoption intent within the study.
Small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs) across Asia Pacific are under increasing pressure to scale quickly, respond to shifting market demands, and maintain continuity across remote and hybrid work environments. Hybrid cloud computing has emerged as a cornerstone strategy for doing so. Data from the study confirms these facts.
Source: The Future of Operations: Advancing AI Innovation and Cloud Agility for Small and Medium Sized Businesses, a commissioned study conducted by Forrester Consulting on behalf of Crayon, March 2025
SMBs are chasing ‘cloud first’ but their hybrid strategies are shifting away from ‘cloud only’ to encompass on-premises and edge.
This shift is partly driven by the rapid emergence and adoption of AI within the SMB sector that is highlighted in the study.
It also reflects continued modernisation for industries with distributed operations, such as manufacturing, healthcare, retail banking and education.
The influence of regulatory change and compliance challenges is not to be overlooked either.
The study shows SMBs have increased awareness of data sovereignty as an issue, and this may have influence on thinking for where data is stored and processed.
Microsoft Azure remains one of the most powerful and accessible platforms that partners can leverage to help customers achieve their hybrid cloud objectives.
Hybrid cloud isn’t just about infrastructure—it’s about aligning business agility with IT architecture.
For many SMBs, moving fully to public cloud isn’t always possible due to cost, legacy applications, data residency, or latency concerns.
Hybrid cloud enables these businesses to:
Microsoft Azure has become the go-to platform to make hybrid cloud practical and effective.
Its ecosystem supports seamless integration between on-premises environments and cloud services, reducing complexity and accelerating time-to-value for SMBs.
Azure isn’t just a hyperscale IaaS platform.
It includes a suite of purpose-built tools designed to enable hybrid and multi-cloud environments.
Let’s run through how a number of these can contribute to productive engagement with customers in the SMB segment.
Formerly Azure Stack HCI, Azure Local unifies all Microsoft’s distributed infrastructure offerings under a single umbrella. Azure Local encompasses Azure Stack HCI and services like Azure Edge Zones, Private MEC, and Local Regions that deliver Azure services closer to users and workloads.
These technologies aren't always well understood by SMBs—but they are instrumental in bridging old and new environments with minimal disruption.
It’s no secret: the margins on Azure licensing are slim. But the partner opportunity lies in building high-value services.
For partners willing to specialise, these services offer recurring revenue, sticky engagements, and high customer lifetime value.
By designing for hybrid needs, partners can also cross-sell into security, backup, networking and application modernisation.
Microsoft Azure has matured into a platform that enables scale—but it can be daunting for any business customer that doesn’t have the right support.
Building an Azure practice enables partners to respond to the high level of need for external expertise – not for licensing, but for everything that goes into driving sustained value from the investment.
An Azure practice is also a springboard to expand into:
All of these adjacent areas can be developed into from a single Azure foundation.
All of these address areas of high demand and service need from SMB customers over the next two years.
When you choose Crayon, you’re placing a wining bet on distribution, done differently. We back our mission to create value for our partners and will enable you to:
Hybrid cloud is more than a transition path—it’s a competitive advantage. For SMBs, it unlocks scalability, resilience, and innovation without wholesale IT disruption. For partners, it offers recurring revenue and service stickiness.
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