There are many cloud computing solutions to choose from, and one size rarely fits all. One popular cloud-computing platform is Microsoft’s Azure, an array of integrated cloud solutions that include infrastructure and application services that can help your organisation overcome business challenges.
Let’s take a look at some of those challenges and how Azure can benefit your business.
Aging and inflexible infrastructure
Investing in IT infrastructure such as on-site servers come with several downsides. For starters, there’s the cost of initial investment, which is often too steep for a small business. Then, there’s the eventual lagging performance, risk of system failure, and obsolete security measures that come with aging systems. And since your organisation has to continually maintain or upgrade this hardware, there are additional running costs, as well as warranty and replacement issues, such as costly downtime.
On-site technology isn’t guaranteed to grow with the demands of your business. In fact, upgrades and replacements are a certainty for most businesses because performance degradation is inevitable for business technology that doesn’t scale. Meanwhile, Azure is fully scalable at a rate that is affordable for small- and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), which means that your organisation pays for only what it uses.
Azure is also fully compatible and has full integration with the latest applications. You won’t need to invest in software upgrades to keep using the software your operations depend upon.
Moreover, a cloud-based server or Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) like Microsoft Azure always uses state-of-the-art technology and comes with ongoing maintenance and automatic updates. Users can also rest assured that Microsoft always deploys the latest version of Azure in real time with a 100% uptake.
Bandwidth costs
Bandwidth comprises a big portion of an on-site server budget. And even if they pay a high price, an enterprise may find bandwidth limited or insufficient. By hosting enterprise data on Azure, bandwidth is shared, reducing the cost by a large margin.
Security and compliance concerns
If your server is hosted on Azure’s cloud platform, you have top-of-the-line security from Microsoft’s own data centre security — their facility even rivals the security of military installations. To put it into perspective, consider that a typical on-site server installed in a cabinet is secured only by lock systems and CCTV.
Backed by the experience and industry expertise of a titan like Microsoft, you can also expect that the data security and privacy features on Azure are the tightest possible and were embedded during its development.
A single sign-on feature promises secure and seamless logins, as well as gradual controls that make access location- and device-specific. Azure also has unified security management and advanced threat management across hybrid cloud workloads, as well as a global incident response team working 24/7 to deal with threats and attacks.
Your compliance headaches are also taken care of by building compliance into Azure’s functionalities. For instance, Azure Information Protection ensures data is identifiable and secure. It also enables you to classify, label, and track the usage of stored files. Functionalities such as these ensure that data security and privacy conforms with regulations, such as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).
Compliance is built into other functionalities, too, such as Azure’s Data Factory and HDInsight. Azure allows your users to collaborate on documents on any device or from any location without worries of security incidents.
Disaster recovery
Businesses typically underinvest in disaster recovery and end up with unreliable backup solutions. With Azure, your organisation’s disaster recovery is ensured by a backup cloud solution that has unlimited scaling and 99.99% availability. Everything stored in Azure gets backed up in the cloud automatically on another server within the vast Microsoft network, via Locally redundant storage (LRS) or geo-redundant storage (GRS). GRS, as the name suggests, replicates backup data into a secondary region, hundreds of miles from the primary backup source. This ensures that data in this secondary site is safe from natural disasters or outages that may befall the primary backup source.
A quick glance at Azure’s benefits
To sum up, here are the benefits that you can expect from a cloud platform like Azure.
- Scalability – Azure automatically provides computing resources based on your business projections and needs
- Support – Azure is supported in 19 regions around the world and has a 24/7/365 help desk
- Analytics – With Azure cloud, you visualize business data and gain insight with ease
- Reliability – Azure saves six copies of your data and guarantees 99.99% availability of your backups
Enable your team to access, share, and edit business files whenever, wherever. Empower your organisation with the capabilities to build, manage, and deploy applications on a massive global network. At Total Calibration, we offer you all the benefits of Azure by professionally monitoring, managing, and maintaining it for maximum uptime and reliability at no upfront cost and at flexible pricing options. Contact us today.
