5 Reasons to Use Microsoft Azure Cloud for Your Enterprise

Cloud computing is a part of modern computer science. It delivers services through the Internet. These services include tools like servers, data storage, databases, networking, and software. Cloud computing suits people and enterprises that want cost savings, higher productivity, speed, efficiency, performance, and security.

By adopting cloud technology, companies can reduce costs, improve business agility, and use data in a streamlined way. As companies move their infrastructure to the cloud, IT professionals who specialize in cloud computing are in demand too.

The top five cloud service market leaders across the globe are Amazon (AWS), Microsoft (Azure), Google (GCP), IBM, and Alibaba. In this article, we look at five reasons to use the Microsoft Azure cloud for your enterprise.

What is the Microsoft Azure Cloud?

Azure is a fast-growing cloud computing platform. It is also an online portal. You use it to access and manage the cloud services and tools that Microsoft provides. These services and resources include storing data and transforming it efficiently, based on your needs. To use them from anywhere, you need an active internet connection and access to the Azure portal. It is free to start and follows a pay-per-use model. This means you only pay for the services you choose.

Azure offers more than 200 services in 18 categories. These categories include computing, networking, storage, IOT (Internet of Things), migration, mobile, analytics, containers, AI (Artificial Intelligence), machine learning integration management tools, developer tools, security, databases, DevOps, media identity, and web services. Survey reports and statistics show that the annual growth of Azure and GCP is nearly 2X that of AWS.

5 Reasons to Choose Microsoft Azure Cloud for the Enterprise

There are lots of reasons to choose Azure for the enterprise. The major five features are below.

1. Identity & Access Management (IAM)

Azure offers secure IAM functions with the Azure Active Directory service. They make sure the right users access the correct information. With Azure, enterprises can adopt mature IAM capabilities. This reduces identity management costs and makes the business more flexible and agile. As a result, it supports innovative business initiatives.

Other public cloud platforms, such as Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform, also provide similar capabilities. However, Microsoft launches new components in Azure at a very high speed. It is therefore clear that Azure scores higher in the marketplace. Trusted Microsoft partners such as Savant help enterprises build scalable and secure cloud-native applications on the Azure platform. For example, Savant helped a US-based utility service provider build a Smart Water Metering system with the complete Azure services.

Azure identity and access management capabilities protect corporate data centres and cloud resources against unauthorized access. You can enhance security with multifactor authentication and conditional access policies. Advanced security reporting, logging, and alerting also help you monitor unauthorized activity. This reduces potential security issues. With Azure IAM, we can:

• Create and operate a single identity service for each user across your hybrid infrastructure.
• Provide rules-based multifactor authentication for both on-premises and cloud applications.
• Provide single sign-on access to your applications.
• Provide secure remote access to optimize on-premise Web applications.
• Improve user productivity and quality too.

2. Cost-Efficient Platform

Microsoft’s pay-as-you-go model lets users pay only for what they use. You can build or expand resources for as long as you need them with Azure services and tools.

Microsoft Azure Cost Management is a Software as a Service solution. It lets organizations monitor, record, and optimize cost and expense in a multi-cloud environment with many services. It is available for all Azure customers and partners. Azure offers end-to-end cost management that helps customers and partners get the most value for what they spend. With the Azure Cost Management service, Microsoft is committed to keep investing in a multi-cloud environment.

You can use the Azure Cost Management and Billing feature in these scenarios:

• Conduct billing admin tasks such as paying your bill or trying to optimize the cost
• Manage billing access to costs for services.
• Proactively apply data analysis to your costs to find the best approach way.
• Set spending threshold values.
• Identify services for workload changes that can optimize your spending limits
• Download cost and consumed data that was used to generate monthly invoices.

3. High Availability

High availability is a feature of computing infrastructure. It lets the infrastructure provide services even when a component fails. Simply put, high availability means your system’s data stays alive and works fine when something goes wrong. Cloud systems cannot tolerate interruptions in service. Any downtime can result in financial loss. For this reason, Azure, like any other cloud, removes single points of failure.

Azure cloud infrastructure uses geographies, regions, and availability zones, which limit the blast radius of a failure. Azure availability zones are physical locations within an area. Each zone has one or more data centers with independent power, networking, and cooling. Azure offers a 99.99% virtual machine uptime service level agreement (SLA). Consequently, failures are less likely to affect customer data and applications.

Microsoft has announced more than 60 regions, which is more than any other cloud provider across the globe. So, Azure makes it easy to choose the data center and region that is right for you and your customer.

4. Complements and expands your current IT infrastructure

The Azure cloud lets your IT administrators focus on your business scenarios. They do not need to worry about on-premise capabilities, maintaining equipment, or monitoring services that are over-taxed or unused. The platform also makes it agile and easy to deploy your current applications with relatively little downtime.

A cloud-integrated development environment brings down the learning curve. As a result, teams understand and master the platform quickly. Additionally, the platform has a bigger footprint in countries than Google (GCP) or Amazon (AWS). This gives faster content delivery, while CDN-like services optimize the user’s experience. Your company can grow with it, and you only pay for the services you use.

5. Enterprise-level Development Tools

This flexibility comes from the Azure cloud. It lets users build next-generation web and mobile applications with an optimal amount of effort. Azure cloud enriches many services, which is the most exciting feature of Microsoft Azure. It lets any organization plan, create, deploy, and maintain its own web applications with many sought-after tools and programming languages. This list includes Python, .NET, Java, and Kubernetes, and it goes on.

Azure cloud has many tools that enterprises use on a day-to-day basis. In addition, Azure uses various management resources while building hybrid applications, from automatic updates to container orchestration. Its end-to-end development platform provides dedicated and powerful testing environments. They can help you optimize your customer experiences and internal web apps.

Conclusion

Azure is a cloud service platform and an online portal. It lets you access, manage, and compute cloud services and resources that Microsoft provides. These services and tools include storing your data and transforming it as your requirements need. To access them, you need an active internet connection and access to the Azure portal. The Microsoft Azure cloud is a perfect fit for an enterprise. Because it is flexible, you can also use it in different workload automation scenarios. If you plan a move, see our custom software services.