By The Atlas Team | Tags: Cloud
Introduction
Let’s not beat about the bush. Suppose your business has a legacy physical infrastructure that's costing you an arm and a leg. In that case, this article will provide the most take-home value you've experienced this year. We're going to provide you with a seamless solution, within a cost range that makes ultimate sense, to:
- Scale your on-premises environments.
- Structure traditional disaster recovery solutions.
A recent Gartner report projects that enterprises in the US will channel 45% of their spending through the cloud by 2024. Therefore, we suggest making an operational shift to greater cloud dependency as a significant first step, but it doesn't end there. Companies nationwide have accelerated a transition to remote working and maximizing digital technologies simultaneously. To keep pace with these dynamic changes, we believe there's a strong case for selecting Microsoft Azure as your preferred cloud provider.
The Microsoft Azure benefits are numerous and compelling
Most businesses already have an integrated Microsoft footprint, creating a natural springboard for launching a cloud strategy. That aside, Azure is far and away from the leader in public cloud services. Why? Because this juggernaut company has leveraged its industry advantages to the hilt. Here are the meaningful differences, in no particular order:
1. World-Class Security
Azure eases your mind on combatting cybersecurity threats flying at us from all angles, attacking our data and system continuity. Protection from virtual incursions lies at the Azure’s core. The company has invested at least a billion dollars to close almost every loophole that invites hackers into your world. More specifically, this crucial cloud feature includes:
- Advanced encryption for your data protection. It incorporates multi-factor authentication, proxy card access readers, biometric readers, and scanners.
- Tracking and identifying known and new threats: Thus, embracing detecting, investigating, and responding to over eight trillion daily global cyberattacks bombarding our system every day. They do this by:
- Employing the latest in AI technologies
- Demonstrating unprecedented agility in reacting to obstructions as they emerge.
- Covering all your endpoints, identities, email, and applications.
- Providing a Virtual Private Network (VPN) to make working remotely a breeze with unsurpassed peace of mind.
2. The Most Extensive Compliance Cover
Compliance is a crucial consideration in the sense that, without it, it's impossible to create environments that meet specific regulations set by numerous countries and oversight bodies. Microsoft’s ninety inter-continental compliance certifications, aside from unsurpassed geographic coverage, embrace a broad industrial spectrum that includes (to mention a few):
- Health
- Government
- Finance
- Education
- Manufacturing
Moreover, the company led the adoption of the current international standard for cloud privacy - ISO 27018.
3. Outstanding Hybrid Cloud Capabilities
It’s vital that your tech team achieves maximum point-to-point connectivity and usability and migrates apps or data while tracking usage. There’s nobody who understands this better than the Microsoft cloud engineering division. Accordingly, Azure offers its users a hybrid services menu that provides everything you need to fuse your on-premises system with the public cloud safely and fast.
4. Hope for the Best, but Prepare for the Worst
Data is arguably your most valuable asset these days. As it builds up, you may find it’s growing at an exponential rate, creating unique protection challenges for your IT administrators. A possible collapse of the system, resulting in disastrous downtime, is front and center of the Azure thinking and design.
So, Microsoft has simplified recovery of lost data by providing virtual machine backup, Structured Query Language (SQL) workloads, and on-premises Virtual Machine technologies (VMware) obtainable with a single keypad stroke. These and other built-in disaster recovery tools are at the cutting-edge of keeping your business running smoothly with all your apps functioning without unnecessary threats.
5. An impactful PaaS and IaaS Services Combination
Microsoft’s Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) allows you to scale on-demand and only pay for what you use. In addition, they eliminate the need to buy and manage your infrastructure outside of the Azure format. The latter's sophisticated development tools and pre-coded application components built into the platform:
- Significantly cuts your coding time.
- Bolsters your development capabilities without adding to your HR resources.
Indeed, automatic scalability is a driving force behind the undeniable movement to the cloud. Everything around this revelation indicates enhanced flexibility. The Azure brand is at the forefront of scalability from every angle.
6. User Friendly
Microsoft Azure makes sure to stay with user familiarity, staying with popular tools like:
- Visual Studio
- ASP
- NET, and programming languages like Visual Basic, C++, and C#.
The company's attention to guidance, training and education is way ahead of the curve, with extensive documentation, certification courses, and a network of trusted partners capable of assisting customers with migration and the ongoing management of the Azure platform.
7. Finally – Price
Microsoft Azure has baked affordability into its offer by configuring fees to align only with what you use, thus erasing excess capacity from the formula. IT budgets love the platform because it promises to decrease infrastructure and administration as the burden of ongoing maintenance shifts to Azure. However, connection to in-house IT experience and expertise is critical to ensure a clockwork migration and transition (see more on this below).
Conclusion
Microsoft Azure holds numerous enterprise and SMB benefits, as long as your team commits to it and isn’t deterred by a somewhat involved process. We suggest securing the partnership of an IT professional versed in Microsoft Azure from the top down, and from corner to corner.
The latter should take responsibility for ensuring Microsoft Azure is a good fit, which means strategizing the appropriate applications, workloads, and virtual machines to migrate. Also, a seasoned IT entity will guide you in structuring security, tracking usage, establishing backup, and covering all the pitfalls that trigger system collapse. Finally, there's no substitute for expertise when it comes to filling in the technology and management gaps as they arise.
