What is Azure CSP? Benefits & Cost Savings Guide [2025]

If you’re managing Azure environments, your procurement strategy is a critical decision point. With Azure now commanding nearly 24% of the global cloud market, businesses are increasingly looking for ways to optimize their cloud spending without sacrificing performance. Although buying directly from Microsoft is an option, many organizations are discovering that the Azure CSP (Cloud Solution Provider) program offers a more powerful combination of flexibility, expert support, and cost governance.

The value of a strategic partner is becoming even more apparent with some recent market shifts, including Microsoft’s 2025 price updates that introduced a premium for monthly billing on annual terms. An expert CSP helps you navigate these complexities, unlocking significant cost savings and operational efficiencies that are often out of reach with a direct purchasing model. For many, a CSP is more than just a reseller; they’re a direct path to a better return on investment when it comes to Azure.

Explore exactly what the Azure CSP program is and how it compares to other purchasing options in this detailed guide. We’ll break down actionable cost optimization strategies specific to CSPs and guide you through evaluating and selecting the right partner — all with the goal of maximizing the value of your Azure investment.

What is Azure CSP?

At its core, the overall Microsoft CSP program is a licensing framework that enables certified Microsoft partners to sell and manage the full suite of Microsoft cloud services (including Azure, Microsoft 365, and Dynamics 365) directly to customers.

The main difference from traditional direct purchasing plans is that the CSP owns and oversees the entire customer lifecycle. That means they are responsible for provisioning, billing, and providing first-line support — creating a single and accountable point of contact for your organization.

Source: Azure CSP Hierarchy

So, why opt for an Azure CSP instead of going straight to the source?

The choice usually comes down to three major advantages: expertise, simplicity, and value.

A good CSP goes beyond the traditional reseller role to act as your strategic cloud advisor, bundling Microsoft’s powerful technology with their own managed services, specialized technical support, and industry-specific solutions. The integrated approach simplifies the guesswork and streamlines your operations by consolidating all your cloud needs (including licensing, billing, and advanced support) under one roof, with a predictable monthly invoice.

To make this happen, the Azure CSP program is structured into two vendor models:

• Direct (Tier 1) CSPs purchase directly from Microsoft and have the infrastructure to manage billing and support at scale, having met strict revenue and support metrics.
• Indirect (Tier 2) CSPs, often called resellers, work through a Direct CSP (also known as a distributor) to allow a broader range of IT providers that offer Microsoft cloud services. The expanded network ensures that businesses of all sizes can access partner-driven Azure expertise and support.

Azure CSP vs. Direct Purchase: A Complete Comparison

Choosing how to get your Azure services is a strategic decision that goes far beyond just the price tag. The choice impacts your support experience, administrative workload, and overall flexibility. The main alternatives to CSPs are direct purchasing options like Pay-As-You-Go (PAYG), which is ideal for those just getting started, or the Enterprise Agreement (EA), designed for large organizations with predictable, high-volume cloud spends.

For most businesses that don’t fit the rigid structure of an EA, the choice boils down to CSP versus pay-as-you-go. While PAYG offers simplicity, a CSP provides a more comprehensive and value-driven partnership. Let’s explore some of the real-life scenarios and differences between the models to help you decide which is the best fit for your organization’s specific needs.

Cost Structure and Pricing Models

The most obvious difference lies in how you pay for your Azure services. With PAYG, you pay Microsoft’s standard list price for the resources you consume, typically billed monthly to your credit card. Although this traditional route is straightforward, it can become expensive and a bit unpredictable as you scale and your computing needs fluctuate.

There are no built-in discounts or cost governance. An EA offers volume discounts but locks you into a rigid three-year commitment with a large upfront payment.

The CSP model offers a more nuanced approach, where the partner sets the price — which often includes a discount passed on from Microsoft’s partner incentives. Billing is flexible, either monthly or annually, and consolidated into a single and easy-to-understand invoice. This predictability is a significant advantage.

For a growing startup, a CSP can not only typically provide better pricing than PAYG, but they can also offer crucial architectural and support guidance. For mid-sized companies, CSPs can deliver helpful cost optimization via services like Reserved Instance management, which would otherwise be a complicated and self-managed task.

Support and Service Levels

With a direct purchasing model, you rely on Microsoft’s standard support channels. The included basic support is limited to just billing and subscription issues; you’ll need to purchase a separate (often costly) support plan for any sort of technical assistance.

Although Microsoft agents will certainly get the job done, it’s a massive and impersonal system. You’re just another ticket in a queue to an engineer who has no context about your specific environment or business goals.

Here’s where a CSP completely changes the dynamic. Your CSP will serve as your first line of support and will know your architecture, applications, and business objectives. When you have an issue, you don’t have to explain your setup from scratch. The personal, knowledgeable support generally leads to faster and more satisfactory resolutions, plus more strategic and forward-thinking advice.

What’s more, a good CSP has access to elevated support tiers within Microsoft, so they can more effectively escalate issues on your behalf.

Billing and Administrative Overheard

Welcome to a common paint point for those relying on PAYG or EA models. Anyone who has looked at a raw Azure invoice knows it can be incredibly complex. With dozens of services and often thousands of line items, deciphering the bill and planning internal budgets can become a significant burden for your finance and IT teams.

A CSP absorbs the complexity by reconciling Microsoft’s detailed bill and giving you a simplified invoice, dramatically reducing the administrative overhead. Instead of spending hours trying to make sense of usage meters and SKUs, your team gets a clear and predictable bill from a trusted vendor — freeing up internal resources to focus on more strategic initiatives.

Control and Flexibility Trade-Offs

With a direct PAYG or EA, your organization has sole administrative control over your Azure environment. When you work with a CSP, you delegate administrative privileges (often through a framework like Admin on Behalf Of or GDAP) so they can manage the environment for you. It’s a trade of, sure, but often a very strategic and worthwhile one.

Think of it not as losing control, but rather delegating the management to a trusted expert. In exchange for granting the access, you gain proactive monitoring, ongoing cost optimization, and expert support.

The CSP model provides a lot of flexibility in scaling your licenses and services as your needs change — something an EA struggles with. For most organizations, the value gained from expert management and improved flexibility far outweighs the perceived loss of time-consuming hands-on control.

Azure CSP Cost Optimization Strategies

One of the most compelling reasons to work with a CSP is to unlock cost savings beyond simple discounted rates. Although anyone can use Azure’s native cost-saving tools and features, a CSP brings proactive expertise and management to the table instead of just leaving you to figure things out. CSPs transform cost optimization from a periodic manual task into a continuously managed process.

Source: Azure Cost Management

That’s the key difference: With a direct payment model, you get the tools. With a CSP you have an expert actively using the tools on your behalf.

A skilled CSP can take a multi-faceted approach to managing your cloud expenses that can be difficult to replicate without a dedicated in-house FinOps team. Some of these tactics include:

• Partner-Earned Credits and Discounts: Microsoft offers CSPs a Partner-Earned Credit (PEC) for managing Azure services, giving a financial incentive to partners who actively manage their customers’ Azure environments. CSPs often pass a portion of these savings onto their customers, making their rates more appealing than PAYG.
• Strategic Reserved Instances: Azure Reservations and Savings Plans can reduce costs by up to 72% on predictable workloads, but they can be complex to manage effectively. A talented CSP will analyze your usage to identify ideal reservations, oversee the purchasing and renewals, and continuously monitor usage to make sure you get the full benefit of your investment.
• Automation for Eliminating Waste: Instead of paying for idle resources, an organization’s CSP can implement automated protocols to shut down non-production environments (like dev and testing servers) during nights and weekends or to continuously right-size over-provisioned virtual machines (VMs) and storage based on actual consumption.
• Bundled Services: Since the Azure infrastructure remains the same, CSPs differentiate themselves by the services they include with the technology. This could include proactive security audits, performance monitoring, or cost governance reports as part of their standard service. This gives you expert oversight that prevents issues and cost overruns before they happen.

Ultimately, the real advantage of the CSP model is that these strategies are integrated into a continuously optimizing routine. A good partner doesn’t just help you cut costs once; they establish a governance framework that keeps your spending efficient over the long run. The proactive, managed approach is a major contrast to the typically reactive do-it-yourself nature of managing costs in direct purchasing.

Choosing the Right Azure CSP

Making the move to a CSP is a major strategic decision, and your choice of partner is just as important as the move itself.

The right provider operates as an extension of your team by proactively managing your environment and adding value. The wrong one, however, can become just another vendor or expense. Even worse, they become a source of friction that hinders your progress.

Source: Azure CSPs

Vetting potential CSPs means looking beyond the sales pitch and evaluating their skills, support structure, and overall approach. Look for a partner that meets not just your technical needs but also aligns with your business goals and company culture.

Qualifications and Certifications

Start by looking for objective proof of a CSPs expertise. Microsoft’s partner designations are a reliable starting point. The Azure Expert Managed Services Provider (MSP) is the most prestigious, as organizations must pass a rigorous third-party audit that validates their technical skills, customer successes, and ability to manage complex Azure environments at scale.

You should also understand whether a partner is a Direct (Tier 1) or Indirect (Tier 2) CSP.

Direct CSPs have a, well, direct billing and support relationship with Microsoft, which often translates to faster escalation paths and more robust internal systems. An Indirect CSP works through a distributor, which adds another layer to the support and billing chains. A Direct CSP often provides a more streamlined and accountable experience to organizations with complex requirements.

Technical Expertise and Support

Once you’ve verified a partner’s qualifications, dig into their real-world capabilities. Ask specific operational questions to gauge their knowledge depth and support quality.

A great CSP will be able to provide clear, confident answers about Service Level Agreements (SLAs) for response and resolution times, if they offer 24/7 support with experienced engineers, if you have a dedicated account manager, and what their process is for escalating critical issues to Microsoft. Basically, ask the questions that reveal what you can expect when you have a critical production issue at 3 a.m.

Integration Capabilities

How will your CSP integrate with your organization’s existing workflows and tools?

A modern DevOps team relies on a specific set of technologies for CI/CD, monitoring, and security. A valuable partner will be able to work within your ecosystem rather than force you into their own processes. A partner that adapts to your workflow, whether it’s Azure DevOps, Jenkins, Datadog, or other platforms, minimizes friction and helps you maintain or increase velocity.

Best Practices for Onboarding

Once you’ve selected a partner CSP, build a successful relationship from the very start. A productive onboarding process starts with establishing clear communication channels (like a shared Teams channel), defining roles and responsibilities for both of your organization and the CSP, and scheduling regular check-in meetings.

The initial effort spent at onboarding will establish the collaborative relationship and true partnership instead of just another vendor agreement.

Maximizing Azure CSP Value With Advanced Cost Management

All in all, the Azure CSP model offers a powerful framework for managing your cloud services, going beyond a simple and transactional relationship to a more strategic partnership. By prioritizing flexibility, leveraging expert support, and selecting the right partner, you can ensure your Azure investment is both efficient and effective.

A CSP provides a managed, proactive approach to your cloud environment, transforming cost optimization from a periodic chore into a continuous, expert-led discipline. This enables your team to focus on innovation rather than the mundane and meticulous tasks of cloud administration.

As your organization scales, however, managing costs across multiple subscriptions and tenants can become a significant challenge. Native tools like Azure Cost Management are a good starting point, but they often fall short in complex environments.

Native tools can’t provide a consolidated view of costs across multiple subscriptions simultaneously, forcing teams to manually switch contexts and aggregate data. Combined with data refresh delays of up to 24 hours, organizations have a hard time getting comprehensive and real-time view of their spending.

That’s where a dedicated cost management platform becomes essential for any serious Azure user.

For organizations that need deeper visibility and more powerful automation, Turbo360 offers an advanced Azure cost management solution built to handle all these complexities (and more). Unlike native tools, Turbo360 is designed specifically for multi-subscription and multi-tenant environments, providing a single view that eliminates data silos. In fact, this challenge is so common that we’ve created a guide on exploring Azure costs for multiple subscriptions.

With Turbo360, you can move from reactive analysis to proactive control. The platform enables you to automate the cleanup of idle resources and schedule stat/stop times for non-production resources. Its granular cost analysis tools and advanced anomaly detection helps you drill down into your spending and pinpointing exactly where your budget is going. Our goal is to identify unexpected spikes before they become major problems.

As you embrace the strategic benefits of Azure CSP, pair it with a powerful cost management platform like Turbo360 to ensure you not only start smart but continue to optimize and maximize your cloud ROI as you grow. Start your 15-day free trial here.