Key points
- Microsoft Azure gives enterprises the flexibility to start small and grow their infrastructure as their business grows.
- Enterprises can easily integrate Microsoft apps and services into its existing solutions.
- Microsoft Azure offers secure cloud solutions by using sophisticated encryption algorithms and techniques.
Australia is at the forefront of cloud adoption. Approximately 95% of organisations are running applications or experimenting with infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), with cloud service providers, such as Microsoft Azure, managing the infrastructure – and for a good reason. They are seeing the benefits of migrating their apps and workloads to the cloud.
Microsoft Azure (‘Azure’) is one of the fastest growing and most secure cloud infrastructure platforms available today. It is renowned for its speed, flexibility, and resilience. It boasts the highest amount of security and privacy certifications of any cloud provider. Azure empowers workers to be more productive, enables cognitive learning and AI, and can ultimately transform businesses.
Here our cloud specialist, Dev G, digs a bit deeper into the benefits your business could experience shifting to Microsoft Azure.
Ability to scale on demand.
Cloud infrastructure is hugely beneficial to organisations looking to shift workloads to an expandable pool of resources that can contract and enlarge as demand requires; Azure is no exception. Azure scales alongside an enterprise’s current needs, Enterprises can monitor and tailor their cloud usage as per their workload requirements in a secure environment with no limitation on server capacity. Thus, giving them the flexibility to augment their infrastructure at a pace that suits their business needs.
Azure can also be set up to auto scale as workloads change. With greater scalability, enterprises can gain the experience and confidence in operating their business in the cloud as they continue to grow, while only paying for what they use.
Tip – To make the most of Azure’s hyper-scale environment and avoid unnecessary costs, enterprises should avoid making the common mistake of ‘just’ migrating from on-premises to the cloud. Enterprises need to continue to monitor Azure once they have migrated to the platform. There are helpful tools, such as Azure Advisor and Azure’s auto-scaling engine, to help set triggers to analyse the environment, including workload behaviour, and create sanctions for availability, performance, security, and cost.
Greater Flexibility
In the dynamic technology sector, enterprises need to partner with a host that can evolve as quickly as their needs do. Azure can easily adapt to an enterprise’s unique business needs and provides the capability to manage, deploy and control infrastructure from almost anywhere, at any time, enabling enterprises to modify the cloud as required.
Tip – When adopting Azure, enterprises need to scrap the ‘lift and shift approach. They need to see Azure as a highly scalable and adaptable solution that can be right-sized to their specific and current needs – such an approach will lead to many cost savings.
More Availability
Azure features an industry-leading SLA and more than 10,000 Availability Zones enabling businesses to migrate their workloads seamlessly from one locality to another.
Tip – Enterprises need to be mindful that the availability is not built-in to Azure by default. Just because it is in the cloud does not mean a resource is always available. It is important workloads enterprises can access their workloads from more than one virtual machine within the same availability zone (to achieve a high SLA).
Improved Accessibility
Azure offers enterprises the freedom to access services from any device and any location in a secure environment. Azure enables enterprises to easily integrate Microsoft apps and services into their existing solutions. Enterprises can also use the Microsoft Azure App service to write apps that use all the platform’s capabilities, including app storage, networking, servers, storage, database, analytics, and machine learning.
Robust Security
Azure offers several secure cloud solutions which use sophisticated encryption algorithms and techniques. When users access Microsoft cloud services, they can retain complete control of their data while remaining fully protected. Azure’s also gives enterprises the flexibility to choose which apps they want to use, the level of encryption to employ and other settings.
Tip – Enterprises need to ensure they have the right security and backup levels in place when they move to Azure – ultimately, it is their responsibility regardless of if the workloads are on-premises or in the cloud. Enterprises also need to extend their continuity strategy, processes and tools to include Azure – there are various storage and backup tools available.
Ability to optimise costs
Many customers have no idea what discounts or entitlements are available with Microsoft Azure and therefore miss out on huge cost savings. With Microsoft’s huge customer base, it has been able to offer discounted prices to its customers. As the market gets more competitive with AWS and Google, costs will likely go down even further. Also, Azure provides a ‘pay what you use’ model, which significantly reduces the upfront costs for small businesses.
Tips – Azure subscriptions should align with an enterprise’s business goals. Governance tools such as Azure Scaffold can be a powerful cost-management tool, helping enterprises protect businesses from human errors, tag resources, set up policies, quickly run reports on various resources and reduce susceptibility to vulnerabilities which could lead to costly mistakes in the future.
A great way to optimise your costs with Azure is to shut down machines that are not mission-critical when they are not in use (e.g., after-hours). If you are using a subscription model and not paying upfront for virtual machines, you don’t need to have your infrastructure operating 24 x7.
Platform as a Service (PaaS)
Another core strength of Azure is its Platform as a Service (PaaS) capability. Completely serverless, enterprises do not have to worry about infrastructure, including monitoring patching or remediating the server. Enterprises do not have to waste time on deploying, configuring, managing, and monitoring IaaS infrastructure Their IT team can spend more time on the business’s strategic aspects; helping it grow and succeed and save on time and money.
Tip – Enterprises must select which workloads they want to move to PaaS as not all workloads are suitable for this environment.
Hybrid Capability
Azure allows enterprises to build hybrid environments, enabling them to take advantage of on-premises resources and the benefits of operating on a cloud platform without any hidden unnecessary costs.
Azure continues to grow rapidly, regularly adding support for various features, applications and different technology platforms. If you are considering migrating to the cloud, Azure should be on the list of options.
Oreta has gold partner status with Microsoft because of its distinctive competencies in Azure, including system integration and managed services. We partner with customers throughout their journey to the cloud – from advisory and delivery to operations and continued optimisation.
