Microsoft Azure was launched on 1st February 2010. It provides virtualisation services that enables organisations and their IT infrastructure to be more efficient in a number of ways. In this blog, we look at how Microsoft Azure benefits businesses that use it.
Availability
Microsoft Azure uses cloud architecture, meaning that data and machines are hosted off-site from where the user is. Microsoft is responsible for monitoring and maintaining Azure products and service throughout their data centers, which are spread across the World.
Owing to the size of Microsoft’s data centres and implementation of failover systems, the chances of Microsoft Azure experiencing downtime is minimal. Regardless of time or location, a business that uses Microsoft Azure will have its assets and services available to licensed staff, enabling them to complete their work whatever the circumstances.
Cost
Information technology can be expensive. Whether it’s storage and servers or people and places, everything has a price. That price only increases the bigger a business gets, and it increases once again as technology advances. That’s where Microsoft Azure becomes incredibly cost-efficient.
As all infrastructure required to power Microsoft Azure’s services are managed and maintained by Microsoft, all associated costs are included in the cost of Azure services. Millions of businesses worldwide use Azure to support elements of their IT, and economies of scale come in to play, making Azure excellent value given all that is included.
Equipment is updated and replaced by Microsoft when required, and the latest technologies are immediately available to the customer once released. Time to provision is reduced, given the high availability of computing power and space available. No extra staff are required, and time is not needed for procurement and delivery of goods. Given Microsoft’s expertise in the space, it is reasonable to expect faultless configuration and maintenance.
Scalability
Microsoft Azure is scalable by nature. Owing to Microsoft’s huge infrastructure and capacity, scaling your housing and usage requirements is simple. Azure can be configured to scale automatically to avoid service interruption and support operational uptime. This is a huge time and cost-saving benefit when compared to the time and funds required to scale upwards if you managed this infrastructure manually. The time spent sourcing the hardware alone could be a few days, before needing to be installed, configured, and tested.
If you are keen to avoid the charges for such scaling, you can cap your spend within the Azure platform. Naturally, if Azure meets the spending cap, it will cease to scale upwards.
In the same way that your services can be scaled up, they can also be scaled down. This is handy for times when extra computational power is required during busy periods, but not thereafter. IT assets are obtainable in the short-term without the need to commit to purchasing a permanent fixture as would be the case if you were housing assets on the premises.
Security
An overlooked advantage of using Microsoft Azure is that any required security updates are automatically performed by Microsoft without the need for manual intervention. This means that you can be sure your systems are up to date with the latest and most robust security updates provided by Microsoft, who are the manufacturer and vendor of Azure services and products. In 2021, Microsoft committed to spending $20 billion on cyber security for its services over a five-year period. Furthermore, as systems sit physically within the jurisdiction of Microsoft data centers and warehouses, the physical security of company assets sitting within the Azure suite of services is excellent.
Any assets that sit on premises owned by your business require the updates to be performed manually. This adds an unnecessary layer of operations to implement updates which should be applied as soon as they are available.
Thinking of switching to Microsoft Azure?
Book a time to talk with our Sales Team to find out how CloudTech24 can support you with starting to use, or switching to, Microsoft Azure, helping to save your business time and money.
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