Microsoft Defender for Cloud Accelerator
A post-sales engagement measured by outcomes, not deliverables: Microsoft tracks sustained growth in your Defender for Cloud usage.
What this is
A post-sales incentive engagement that rewards partners for driving increased usage of Defender for Cloud among existing customers. Success is measured by sustained growth across specific workloads including Defender for CSPM, AI Services, App Services, Cosmos DB, Containers, DNS, Key Vault, Kubernetes, MariaDB, MySQL, PostgreSQL, Resource Manager, Servers, SQL and Storage. Consumption growth must stabilise at or above 80% within 180 days. Eligibility and payouts are determined by telemetry data and partner/customer surveys.
What you leave with
- Defender for Cloud coverage extended across your workloads and sustained, measured by Microsoft telemetry over 180 days
Who qualifies
Your commitment
- Decisions to extend Defender for Cloud to further workloads; the Azure consumption is billed by Microsoft to you
- Partner and customer surveys that Microsoft uses to determine eligibility
How we run it
- A baseline of what you use today, taken before anything changes, so both sides know what growth would even mean.
- Onboarding further workloads or data sources, one decision at a time, each with its own effect on your Microsoft bill stated before it happens.
- Microsoft measures the growth by telemetry. There is no report for us to write and no way for us to flatter the number.
- The partner and customer surveys Microsoft uses to settle eligibility at the end of the period.
In and out
In the funded scope
- Defender for Cloud coverage extended across your workloads and sustained, measured by Microsoft telemetry over 180 days
Not in it
- Your Microsoft consumption. Ingestion and usage are billed to you by Microsoft, and they go up as adoption goes up — that is the arrangement, not a surprise.
- Remediation. The engagement finds and explains; fixing what it finds is a separate engagement, quoted at our normal fixed price.
- Any promise about the number. We can onboard the workloads; whether telemetry crosses Microsoft's threshold depends on your estate, and we will say up front when we think it will not.
The funding, plainly
Microsoft describes this incentive as a co-investment that is not intended to cover the full cost of deployment activities. In practice, Microsoft pays us for a defined portion of this engagement; your commitment is the time and access listed above, plus any fee we state in writing before work begins. We never state Microsoft's funding amount: it varies by customer band and programme period, and quoting it would be guessing. If the programme window closes while your request is in flight, we tell you and requote the same work at our normal fixed price.
Asked before booking
Does Microsoft pay for all of it?
No. Microsoft describes the incentive as a co-investment that is not intended to cover the full cost of deployment activities. Microsoft pays us for a defined portion; your side is the time, access and any fee we state in writing before work begins.
What happens if usage does not grow enough?
Microsoft pays us nothing and you keep the work that was done. That risk sits with us, which is why we tell you before we start when we think the threshold is out of reach for your estate.
What if we do not qualify?
We say so and quote the same work at our normal fixed price. The eligibility check itself costs you nothing but the conversation.