One of the top leaders of cloud service providers is Microsoft with its Microsoft Azure cloud services. As competition in today’s business environment becomes more intense and organizations are under significant pressure to deliver value for their customers, businesses are increasingly shifting their IT infrastructures to the cloud, as cloud computing offers companies the ability to quickly scale up virtual services on demand.
Below, we’ll discuss the benefits of Microsoft Azure, but first, we’ll take a look at the main Microsoft Azure services that are most widely used.
Microsoft Azure Services
Microsoft Azure contains many services that can be adjusted to fit the needs of specific customer requirements:
- Azure Active Directory – a cloud-based directory that simplifies and centralizes all identity management protocols and tasks. Organizations that operate in the cloud, especially larger ones, must manage a large number of users that require login credentials for many different services. Azure Active Directory uses single sign-on features, which makes it easier for users to access all the resources they need with just one set of credentials. In addition, governance control enables system administrators to grant access to specific services only to users who request it.
- Azure Analytics – a collection of several sub-services that collectively provide organizations with the tools they need to store, process, and analyze a vast amount of their data. Organizations can host their entire data infrastructure in Azure to get maximum value from their data and achieve optimal performance.
- Azure SQL – it allows organizations to migrate, develop, and modernize their SQL server applications within Azure. It includes the Azure SQL Database platform as a service (PaaS), which is a managed service that supports cloud application development. Azure SQL automatically patches and updates organizations’ SQL databases, which allows them to spend more time on higher-value priorities that bring innovation and create value for their customers.
Benefits of Microsoft Azure Cloud Services
The main goal of Microsoft Azure is to offer any individual or organization access to tools that used to be complicated and expensive to implement, which can bring many benefits:
- Greater on-premises compatibility – Microsoft Azure allows organizations to be more selective about the number of workflows, applications, and other digital assets they develop on the cloud. Companies can choose to locate their entire IT infrastructure to the cloud or decide to keep some of their on-premises infrastructure and adopt and operate with a hybrid model.
- Lower Cost – Azure is a suite of bespoke solutions where you pay only for what you use. In addition, there are major savings in resource, maintenance, and real estate costs, with the ability to optimize workloads so that they cost less to run.
- Greater flexibility and scalability – When the demand increases or an organization needs more powerful computing resources, it can change its resources instantly on demand. This way, Azure gives organizations a much bigger level of control over their cloud usage and costs. If an organization wants to keep getting value from its existing IT investments, it can adopt a hybrid cloud model.
- Enhanced security – Cloud application security is one of the top priorities as well as concerns of modern businesses. Microsoft Azure has built-in security from the beginning, using a multi-layered security approach that protects all network components, with automatic security patching. Microsoft also provides a set of services, tools, and data intelligence that help users secure workloads and resources in their cloud environment.
- Accelerated time to value – Speed is one of the features of Microsoft Azure, as it’s equipped with a set of pre-built tools and automated solutions, which makes it a lot easier for users to develop and evolve new applications quickly and efficiently. An accelerated time to value also helps organizations become more flexible and adaptable, which is very important with the constant change of market demands.
- Faster recovery – Azure offers an end-to-end backup and disaster recovery solution that is simple, scalable, secure, and cost-effective, and can be integrated with on-premises data protection solutions, which helps improve business continuity. In addition, this backup and disaster recovery solution is cloud-native, highly available, and resilient.
Conclusion
Microsoft Azure offers cost-effective and highly secure cloud services with excellent hybrid flexibility designed to increase developer productivity. If your organization needs help transitioning to the cloud and strengthening security outside of the cloud – which Azure doesn’t cover, you can contact our specialist for more information.
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