ANS has passed the independent audit required to retain Microsoft's Azure Expert MSP designation, covering 267 customers and more than 236,000 Azure resources across 1,930 subscriptions.
Azure Expert MSP is Microsoft's highest-tier managed service accreditation and is renewed annually through a third-party audit rather than a self-certification process. The audit covers architecture, migration, security, and managed services delivery, requiring documented evidence from live customer engagements rather than theoretical capability. Microsoft publishes the list of current holders; as of this renewal ANS remains on it.
The numbers behind the accreditation give some sense of the scale involved. The 1,930 subscriptions managed through Azure Lighthouse span a mix of commercial and public sector customers, and the company's Glass portal provides real-time visibility into those environments alongside round-the-clock monitoring.
This accreditation gives organisations confidence at a critical point in their cloud journey. It proves our Azure capability has been independently tested in real-world scenarios across how we design, deliver and operate at scale. It is also testament to our strong and constantly growing Microsoft expertise, following being named Microsoft UK Partner of the Year last year.
ANS holds all six Microsoft Solutions Partner Designations and was named Microsoft UK Partner of the Year in 2025. The Azure Expert MSP renewal follows that designation, and the company is framing the accreditation in terms of AI readiness — the argument being that organisations moving AI workloads to Azure need a managed services partner whose operational standards have been independently tested.
The accreditation is one of roughly 30 worldwide held by partners at any given time, making it a useful signal for procurement teams assessing Azure partners but not in itself a differentiator beyond that base set. ANS is based in Manchester and serves enterprise, SMB, and public sector customers across the UK.
