In today’s competitive business landscape, businesses need to have an infrastructure that can support their enterprise applications, databases, storage and analytics. To meet these needs, cloud services have emerged as the most cost-effective solution for small and large businesses alike.
Azure is one of the top cloud computing services that businesses use when they want to get their websites up and running quickly, hosting applications to reduce operating costs, creating apps and storing data in the cloud. It’s the second largest cloud computing platform in the world, with 20% of businesses worldwide choosing to base their cloud environments in Azure.
With so many Azure services available, it can be difficult to know which ones are right for your business. Read on to discover the top services and how they can help your company scale, grow, and protect its data.
What is Microsoft Azure?
Microsoft Azure is a cloud computing platform that enables businesses to build, deploy, and manage their applications across a global network of data centers.
Organizations can use Azure to manage their application infrastructure and store data. From here, they can easily scale up or down their application as needed or use the platform to test their applications on a pre-production environment before deploying them in production.
Azure has a broad set of features, including compute, storage, networking, security, and many others, that can be combined to create a custom solution for every organization.
Azure DevOps
Azure DevOps is a combination of tools and services that can help companies build and ship applications more efficiently. The platform includes Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS), Azure Repos, Azure Build, and Azure Pipelines. It allows teams to collaborate on code, automate tasks, and track changes with ease.
DevOps is the perfect solution for teams with many developers working on the same project or for those who want to speed up the development process. Each user can work on the code in any environment – on-premises or in the cloud – and it will be automatically deployed when it’s ready. You can also easily track issues as they are detected by different tools so it becomes easy to understand where problems are coming from.
Azure Active Directory
Azure Active Directory is a set of cloud-based directories and identity management tools that help organizations manage their users and protect their data. With Azure AD, you can control access to Microsoft and third-party applications, as well as protect user identities with multi-factor authentication.
This is a great service for organizations that are already using Azure in their cloud strategy or want to manage access to their applications from a central location.
Azure Virtual Machines
Azure Virtual Machines (VM) enable you to host your application in the cloud. You can choose from a variety of operating systems and preconfigured sizes, or you can create your own custom size. You can even choose how much memory, storage, and CPU power you want to allocate for each instance.
This is a great service for businesses that need to scale up their infrastructure quickly based on expected demand, or have applications that run on specific operating systems. VMs have many built-in features, like autoscaling and load balancing, to achieve high availability and scalability.
Azure Backup
Azure Backup is an online service that protects your data and applications by backing up to the cloud. It provides extensive data protection features, including data backup, archive, and disaster recovery, and can be managed through the Azure portal.
Data backup is essential to the continuity of any business in the face of an unexpected incident or disaster, and yet 96% of US businesses stated they do not back up their workstations, while 75% of small businesses do not have a disaster recovery plan.
With Azure Backup, you get the added benefit of having your data backed up wherever your application is running, whether on-premises or in the cloud. So if you have a workload running in your on-premises datacenter and another workload running in Microsoft Azure, Azure Backup will provide automatic data backups for both locations. You can also take advantage of other features like secure file sharing and secure shredding of sensitive data.
Azure Cosmos DB
Azure Cosmos DB is a distributed database service that scales automatically to enable you to focus on business-critical applications. You can use the API or the Azure portal to create a database and scale up or down based on your needs.
Cosmos DB is the perfect service for organizations that need to process and store large amounts of unstructured data, want to take advantage of container-based serverless architecture, or have a large amount
API Management
Azure API Management is an application-centric management service that secures, manages, and publishes APIs, and creates a discoverable catalogue of web services. It’s ideal for organizations that want to centrally manage access to their APIs, manage lifecycles, and take advantage of analytics to understand how those APIs are being used.
Azure Site Recovery
Azure Site Recovery is an automated disaster recovery solution that lets you replicate your on-premises VMware or Hyper-V environments to Azure. You can also perform scheduled data backups and test the integrity of your replication, failover, and failback processes.
This service will help your business maintain availability and strict compliance requirements, like the Payment Card Industry (PCI).
Discover more Azure services with experts
Microsoft Azure is the right choice for businesses that need scalable cloud infrastructure and integration into their existing enterprise infrastructure. The platform offers a wide range of services, including virtual machines, storage, networking, security, monitoring, mobile, and IoT.
The Microsoft Azure specialists at Technology Solutions can help you implement Azure and its many services into your existing IT environment, educate your people on how to use them, and manage your entire cloud environment. Talk to them today and discover how Azure will benefit your business.
