What is Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft Azure is one of the fastest-growing Cloud Infrastructure Platform in the world today. With more than 100 services to build, test, deploy, and manage applications, Azure is an increasingly expanding set of cloud technology services aiming to meet your organizational challenges and goals. Organizations get a high level of flexibility from its vast volume of choices to manage business-critical software to high-performance standards. This has also led to an increase in the professionals wanting to get an Azure Certification.
Azure is the only platform recognized by Gartner as an industry leader for both infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) and platform-as-a-service (PaaS).
Here we will discuss a few of the benefits of Microsoft Azure:
Microsoft Azure Benefits
Scalability on Demand
This is a great advantage for businesses that require scale together with business. In this age and time, there is no dispute about the fact that organizations need scalability for both expected and unexpected circumstances. It is not easy to predict the growth of the business, though companies do make roadmaps and business goals. But it has been observed.
Businesses do require additional resources many times to manage their unexpected volumes of transactions. This is when businesses feel the need of business robust and scalable models that can handle their other applications with high loads, which cannot be handled by most of the traditional models.
The one way which Azure chooses is by loading applications as a cluster that allows a web application to a specific set of processes. With this, all your applications are not forced to run off a single server, resulting in saving server capacity. Moreover, Azure also has the capability to auto-scale depending on the load or schedule of applications.
Flexibility and Easily Adaptable
Azure can be easily adapted. In this age of fast-evolving technology sphere, Azure allows hosting solutions that can quickly and swiftly help in evolving to new changes as per your business requirements. It offers an array of application building blocks and services to allow its users to customize the cloud service as per the need.
Cost-Effective
Nobody would doubt Microsoft’s vast customer strength. This helps them in passing their vast volumes of discounts on to their customers. It is expected that the competition between Azure, AWS, and Google increases the cost if Azure goes down. Moreover, Azure is a pay-as-you-go model, which helps in dropping the upfront costs to small businesses. Also, organizations get an additional amount of enterprise discount if they sign an agreement with them. All who have doubts about the Azure price increase should know that the company has promised to maintain their prices comparable to AWS for the public.
Customer Support
Azure infrastructure is used in 19 regions across the globe today. It has several data center regions in the US, Europe, the Pacific, Asia, and China. These data centers are used to provide customer support services in English and Japanese and many other languages too.
Can Create a Hybrid Environment
AWS provides a cloud-only environment. However, Azure helps you acquire the ability to build a hybrid application. This allows you to take advantage of both your in-house resources and the cloud without any additional cost.
Here are some of the Microsoft Azure Data Benefits:
Big Data insights
Microsoft Azure HD insight service offers an Apache Hadoop solution to the cloud. Though it might look very complicated at the first mention, this HD insight is a compelling service that allows any size of data to be managed and analyzed at a time. Moreover, you can integrate with Microsoft Excel, which further helps in creating new ways of visualizing the data that would help in disclosing new business insights in achieving business goals.
Robust and Reliable Backups
Azure is capable of giving you a 99.9% backup of your data. It makes six copies of your data across two separate Azure data centers. The site recovery service of Azure is very robust.
Integrated Data Solution
With Azure, you can seamlessly and effortlessly integrate your data across the complete array of Microsoft SaaS and PaaS offerings. The full length of services includes Visual Studio, System Centre, Active Directory, and PowerShell, along with Microsoft software like Office 365 and Microsoft Dynamics solutions, Dynamics ERP (including NAV on Azure), to mention a few. You get a fast, reliable, and scalable environment that enables you to work conveniently with your CRM, ERP, and other business-related data.
If you are not a Microsoft fan, then you should be aware that Azure’s BizTalk services provide application integration solutions for SAP, Oracle EBS, and many more growing numbers of technology providers.
Easy to Use Reliable Data Storage
With Azure at your service, you can store any size and type of data in any format. From saving file data, structured data sets, or queries in a fast and reliable setup, the data can be shared across VMs using the industry-standard SMB 2.1 protocol. You can use import/export features to manage your data or move them as per your choice.
Data is Safe and Secure
Microsoft Security Development Lifecycle was used to build Azure. It is a front-line method to develop the most secure code that was based on time-tested and globally proven technology.
Here are the Azure Management Benefits:
Automation
With Azure Automation, you can automate your tasks in the Azure environment. Time spent on monitoring and managing the resources in a cloud setup can be eliminated by just creating workflows called “runbooks.” This results in reducing the overhead costs and additionally enabling you to concentrate on essential business work.
Scheduling
You can create tasks using Microsoft Azure on easy to use or complicated recurring schedules. That is, if you can have frequent actions like application maintenance, cleaning up logs, or pulling data from an API or feed, Azure’s scheduler eases your work by automating tasks at a scheduled time.
Runs and Deploys Virtual Machines
Azure also helps you in running and deploying premium virtual machines, including Linux and Windows servers in just a few minutes. It also assigns premium storage to a virtual machine you use and starts running 32 TB and accomplishes 50,000 IOPS (input/output operations/second).
API Management
Azure’s API Management can help you publish your APIs securely on a larger scale to your customers and employees if you create and operate a variety of APIs.
Options of Developer Collaboration
Applications like Visual Studio Online and Application Insights of Azure help in active collaboration between your different development teams in an integrated environment. Furthermore, you also have the choice of creating new applications in PHP, ASP, ASP.net, Node.js, or Python. This way, you are not bound with just Visual Studio if you have options to choose from.
Right Environment for Every Business
By now, you have got a good understanding of many features of Microsoft Azure. You must have already gauged by now whether an Azure environment would be the right environment for your business. Today, Azure is amongst the top cloud platforms that are increasingly expanding and adding more support services and features for wide-ranging technology platforms. Therefore, if you have plans to move your business to the cloud, then Azure will make your tasks easier and smooth for you.
Azure Cloud SCAN
Azure Cloud SCAN helps businesses start, accelerate, and optimize their Microsoft Cloud journey to enhance future business results.
Many cloud technology service providers in the industry do a free assessment of your business requirements. You will need to understand the essential aspects of the technology with them to migrate your business onto Azure.
Laila Azzahra is a professional writer and blogger that loves to write about technology, business, entertainment, science, and health.