A few years back when cloud computing came to the market, it’s implementation and effectiveness in the business world was not clear. As time passed, with the rapid advancement of technology cloud computing started gaining popularity among all types of businesses. The main reason why cloud computing has such a huge buzz in the industry is being prominently effective in improving customer services and cost savings for thousands of businesses. No doubt why cloud service providers are high on demand today. There are some leading cloud service providers shaping IT infrastructures of small, medium and large business companies in significant ways. Microsoft Azure is one of the leading cloud service providers which initially began its journey in 2010. It is around 2012 when people started using Azure services. Since then Microsoft Azure has made significant improvement the way they are delivering the services.
What is Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft Azure is a growing collection of the integrated and comprehensive set of cloud services which developers and IT professionals use to build, deploy and manage applications through a global network. It provides the major three types of cloud services which are Software As A Service (SAAS), Platform As A Service (PAAS) and Infrastructure As A Service (IAAS) and also supports various types of programming languages.
Why choose Microsoft Azure?
When we talk about Microsoft, it is known to make things user-friendly. Over the period of years, they have made a lot of enhancements to advance their services. Majority of us at some point of our life have used Microsoft’s Office applications and we know how simple it is to do document works, projects and calculations with them. Microsoft introduced some important aspects where Azure performs better than any other cloud service providers. In this context, a notable fact to be mentioned is that Microsoft was featured in the Leader’s Quadrant on Gartner 2015 Cloud IAAS Magic Quadrant. Gartner is the IT consulting firm which conducts market research and data analysis to publish reports on industry’s leading competitors’ performance in terms of improvement and progression in the market. Infrastructure? A Service is one of the cloud systems where a cloud provider manages software, servers, hardware, storage, system maintenance and back up of an organization on behalf of its users. Microsoft Azure has surpassed it’s leading competitors in terms of high-quality performance, high-security features, excellent availability, advanced performance and lastly commendable customer services. 90% of Fortune 500 companies have moved to Microsoft Azure.
Let’s take a look at some of the services that Azure offers us.
Virtual Machines
You have the flexibility to create the virtual machine (VM) in seconds for your on-premises platform or you can scale up VM to the cloud to make rooms for other applications and to balance resources. Opt for convenient operating systems like Windows, Linux, SQL, Oracle, IBM, SAP to work on VM. You will get options to scale up from one to thousands of VM instances. You can add Microsoft applications on VM to meet great stability and performance.
App Service
Unify your development of powerful cloud apps for the website and mobile clients with Azure platform. Azure helps to accelerate by integrating your preferred tools, frameworks and languages with Azure app service. Build and deploy mobile and API apps from a single backend with preferred languages like .NET, Java, PHP, Node.js and Python. Increase high productivity development with API services, pre-built apps, integration and debugging procedures and industry standard Microsoft Visual Studio.
SQL Database
The best part of this service is SQL Database automatically learns your unique app development patterns as you run your apps on Azure. SQL Database works as Database as a service as you can scale up or down according to your workload with no downtime. The built-in security SQL Database protects your data and controls access and authorization to meet your regulatory compliances.
Storage
You get simple and distributed cross-platform file system with the benefits of lift and shift migration and data movement of the cloud without any coding. Also, you get the highly scalable storage for unstructured data. For large volume cloud database, you get durable queues where messaging is simple and cost-effective. There is a premium storage of disk for input-output intensive applications.
Azure Cosmos DB
This is designed as a globally distributed database system where individuals can elastically and conveniently scale and store information globally anytime, anywhere. It works as a distributed network for developers where they can replicate their data to any number of regions of their choice with well-defined consistency levels. Azure Cosmos DB allows you to use key value, graph and document work in one service and it automatically indexes all data.
Azure Active Directory
The Azure AD is one of the best features of Microsoft Azure. This is nothing but a convenient identity management solutions providing secure access to on-premises and to cloud platforms including Office 365 and other non-Microsoft SAAS applications. The best part of this feature enables you to do single sign-on using organizational credentials. Once you log in, you can access thousands of cloud applications from any Android, Windows or iOS devices. Developers can add effective identity and security management into their apps with Azure AD.
Backup
The major concern of any business is to protect and back up their sensitive data. The applications and information are everywhere – on-premises servers and in the cloud. Backup helps to protect your data in SharePoint, Exchange, virtual machines, Windows clients and servers. The backup data will have six copies of your data across two Azure datacenters with 99.99% of availability.
Above mentioned were some of the mainly categorized services of Microsoft Azure. Azure comes with a simplified IT Infrastructure management to give your business a significant growth and success. At 365Solutions we will give you a detailed insight of Microsoft Azure services. Our cloud experts with industrial experience will provide strategic solutions to fit your business needs. Reach to us anytime. We are available 24*7.