Microsoft Azure is Microsoft’s cloud platform. It comes with a huge number of tools available on a pay-as-you-use model. But with everything on offer, it can be hard to determine exactly what it can do to benefit your business. And while it makes many things much easier to handle, what works for one company may require a very different configuration for another.
IaaS, PaaS, SaaS and Microsoft Azure
You may have seen these acronyms before. Software-as-a-service takes the work of installing and managing a piece of software out of the hands of users. It’s managed from a central location and accessible over the Internet. One common example of this is Microsoft Office 365.
Platform-as-a-Service provides a development environment that enables developers to build new apps without the burden of maintaining required operating systems, hardware, and development tools. This is a Microsoft Azure service that allows developers to focus on development.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service eliminates the need to maintain a physical data centre. You can purchase scalable remote storage, computing, servers, and networking rather than having to house physical machines yourself.
Provision Virtual Machines in Azure in Seconds
If you need a new server, you could buy the physical equipment and spend time configuring and installing it. Or you could click a few buttons in Azure, and it’s done — and not just Windows. Microsoft also allows you to set up Linux, SQL Server, Oracle, IBM, and SAP virtual machines.
The benefits of a physical data center are even more pronounced when you consider that when you don’t need that server, it’s not sitting unused in your data center, taking up space that you have to pay for. If you only need the power around a particular time period — Christmas season, tax season, time of day, even — you can efficiently scale up and down to meet expected demand.
Store Data with Confidence
Backing up your data is critical for any business. Data loss can have huge consequences, and no matter how disciplined you are, an accident can always happen.
Storing your data on Azure comes with the benefit of Microsoft’s vast scale and redundancies. Microsoft operates large data centers for Azure across the world and encrypts and replicates your data. The chance of total failure is far smaller than you’ll have to tolerate with in-house backup solutions.
Hybrid Cloud through Azure Stack
If you do need to keep some processes local for financial, practical, or compliance reasons, there’s also Azure Stack. This allows you to deliver Azure services through your local data center with a common set of tools like your other Azure operations.
With this, you can get the best of both worlds with one consistent approach.
Microsoft Azure Deployment Made Simple
Getting to grips with as large and varied a service as Microsoft Azure can be a big deal. Answering the question of what, specifically, you should bring from Azure to your company is complex. It depends on what you’re currently doing, where you’re falling behind, what equipment you’re running — and of course, where you want to go. There’s no one-size-fits-all deployment solution when it comes to maximizing efficiency and reducing costs.
Do you need a public, private, or hybrid cloud? Do you need IaaS, PaaS, SaaS, or some combination? How much remote computing are you able to use, and what needs to stay in-house? Do you need to host websites? Support app creation? Store data? Get your whole backup solution handled remotely. We can help you migrate to Azure Active Directory.
At CrucialLogics, we’re experts in Microsoft Cloud Technologies and getting companies of all sizes the relevant solutions to help drive growth.
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